Margaret Robinson
Margaret Robinson
trained as a painter at Leeds College of Art and
at the Slade School of Fine Art in London during
the War. She was always fascinated by marionettes
and while teaching at Sibford Friends School in
Oxfordshire, she started making puppets with the
children. A little later, she ran a Puppet Theatre
with a partner, which travelled around Yorkshire giving
shows in Schools, Youth Clubs and Women's Institutes.
They also travelled abroad, to Germany and Holland.
In 1950, she became mask
maker for the Northern Children's Theatre and School,
run by Esme Church and Molly McArthur and later ran
their Puppet Theatre.
In 1957, with £20 in the
Post Office, she moved to London to seek her fortune in
Theatre and Film. It was while she was working as
a mask maker for Theatrical Costumiers: "Theatre Zoo",
a Company specialising in animal masks and costumes,
that she met her future husband, Bernard Robinson.
Bernard was Production Designer for Hammer Films at
Bray Studios, working on "The Hound of the
Baskervilles" and asked Margaret to make a head
dress to make the hound look more ferocious. The
studio felt that the already quite fierce great dane who
was to play the title role would look even fiercer if
his ears stood up instead of drooping (a nurse was kept
on permanent stand-by while Margaret fitted the mask).
She returned to Bray to make masks and models for many
more films such as "The Mummy" (1959), and the
floor-to-ceiling griffins in "The Brides of Dracula"
(1960).
Margaret married Bernard
Robinson in 1960. She imagined she would be
embarking on a life of exciting parties and prepared
herself to do the business entertaining that she assumed
would be part of Bernard's life. However, this was
not to be the case. Bernard said that he had never
entertained or gone drinking to get films.
"If my work isn't good enough to get me jobs, then I'll
do something else."
Bernard made 76 films in
his career as Art Director or Production Designer from 1946 to 1969 including
"Dracula" (1958) "The Revenge of Frankenstein" (1958),
"The Hound of the Baskervilles" (1959), "The Mummy"
(1959), "The Curse of the Werewolf" (1960), "The Two
Faces of Dr Jekyll" (1960) and "The Phantom of the
Opera" (1962). He had also worked on numerous
earlier films, such as "The African Queen" as a
draughtsman before the war. He died in 1970 at the
age of 57. "It's not the length of life that
counts," he is quoted as saying, "but the
quality."
Eventually, Margaret
returned to teaching puppet-making and painting to Adult
Education Classes in Runnymeade, using the resourceful
approach of her early years with inventive use of
materials in the cause of puppetry. |
