Trivia

Mrs. Dalton was awarded the M.B.E. (Member of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2002 Queen's Birthday Honours for her services to the Film Industry as a Costume Designer.

Yeovil, Somerset, England (julio de 2008)

As of 2021, she has contributed with the costume design of three films that were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar: Lawrence de Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965) and Oliver (1968). Of those, Lawrence de Arabia (1962) and Oliver (1968) are winners in the category.

During World War II, she enlisted for the Women's Royal Naval Service and served at the code-breaking facility at Bletchley Park.

Dalton wasn't even nominated for her most recognizable work - the precision military costumes and Arab wear she designed for Lawrence of Arabia (1962). In a letter, director David Lean wrote to her expressing his disappointment at the lack of recognition: "I blame Columbia and [producer] Sam [Spiegel] for not somehow getting you nominated for your wonderful job. You did it so beautifully that I think they failed to realize every costume was an original by you.".

She started out as a wardrobe assistant on Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944) and got her first costume designer credit dressing Richard Todd and Glynis Johns on Rob Roy: The Highland Rogue (1953).

She aided the legendary Edith Head on Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

During a 2012 BAFTA tribute to her, it was humorously noted that she had clothed literal armies of stars onscreen - "the Red Army, the British Army, the U.S. Army, the Cossacks, the Nazis, the Afghans, the Knights of the Round Table - twice - the Jacobites and the Jacobins ...".

Dalton received praise for the swashbuckling costumes in Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride (1987) and partnered three times with director Kenneth Branagh (also co-starring opposite then-wife Emma Thompson) on Henry V (1989), the neo-noir thriller Dead Again (1991) and the romantic comedy Much Ado About Nothing (1993), her final screen credit.

Across a 15-month period, she created more than 5,000 costumes for Doctor Zhivago, including a dozen basic designs of soldiers' uniforms, which she then individualized with tears and tatters.

As a child, she was fascinated with drawing clothes and learning about how people dressed in the past and the fabrics they used.

For Dr. Zhivago, Dalton and her team ended up making 3,000 individual costumes and putting together 35,000 individual items of clothing for the extras. The characters of Yuri (Omar Sharif) and Lara (Julie Christie) each had approximately 90 costume combinations, and the other six other principal characters had an average of fifteen costume changes each. Because this was before computer-generated imagery, by the time principal photography ended it was estimated the costume dept. had used up a total of 984 yards of fabric, 300,000 yards of thread, 1 million buttons and 7,000 safety pins.

During her storied 50-year-plus career, Dalton also received an Oscar and BAFTA nomination for Carol Reed's Victorian-era best picture winner Oliver! (1968); won a BAFTA for The Hireling (1973), set in post-World War 1; and landed an Emmy for Clive Donner's 1982 telefilm The Scarlet Pimpernel, which takes place amid the French Revolution.

At Ealing Art College, she studied costume design, then picked up work as an assistant for fashion designer Matilda Etches in her Soho workroom, making clothes for dancers Margot Fonteyn and Pamela May, actresses Ivy St. Helier and Renée Asherson and Olivier's Henry V.

A big break came when her aunt entered her into a Vogue talent contest and her work caught the eye of editor Audrey Withers, who introduced her to designer Yvonne Caffin at Gainsborough Studios. She began as her assistant, shopping for ready-made clothes for The Huggetts film series before moving to Twickenham Studios and receiving her first film credit as wardrobe supervisor on the Robert Montgomery 1950 courtroom drama Eye Witness.