Albert Wolsky, a prolific Hollywood costume designer who won Academy Awards for his sequined ensembles for “All That Jazz” and his snappy mobwear for “Bugsy,” and who transformed Olivia Newton-John’s character from saintly to seductive in “Grease,” died on May 23 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 95.
His death was caused by kidney failure, his niece, Marisa Wolsky, said.
After fleeing Paris with his family during World War II and settling in New York, Mr. Wolsky accumulated more than 80 screen credits, according to the Internet Movie Database.
In addition to winning two Oscars, he was nominated for five more, including for his work on the searing 1982 Holocaust drama “Sophie’s Choice,” starring Meryl Streep, who thanked him in her acceptance speech when she won the best actress award.
Mr. Wolsky also worked on Mr. Mazursky’s “An Unmarried Woman” (1978), which brought Jill Clayburgh an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of a New York City gallerist embarking on single life after her husband falls for another woman. Among her outfits was a flowing cape — a symbol of freedom, perhaps — that her character wore for a romantic night on the town.
“Paul was very collaborative and would get me involved very early in the process,” Mr. Wolsky said in a 2024 interview with Hollywood Authentic magazine. “By the time we started rehearsal, I had had weeks of preparation. And that was a gift.”
The celebrated choreographer and director Bob Fosse recruited Mr. Wolsky to work on three feature films: “Lenny,” his 1974 biopic of the law-flouting comedian Lenny Bruce, played by Dustin Hoffman; “All That Jazz” (1979), starring Roy Scheider as Joe Gideon, the director’s screen alter-ego, whose is forced to confront his pill-popping, womanizing ways after a near-fatal heart attack; and “Star 80” (1983), the dark biopic of Playboy’s slain 1980 Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratten (Mariel Hemingway).
Mr. Fosse “was a true perfectionist,” Mr. Wolsky told Hollywood Authentic. “I stepped up a level working for Fosse.”
Not all directors cared so deeply about costumes. Mr. Wolsky recalled Woody Allen giving him maddeningly little guidance for “Manhattan” (1979): “If an actor wanted to wear a pajama top, that’s what they wore.”
It scarcely mattered, because Mr. Wolsky was so exacting. To create period-appropriate attire for “Road to Perdition” (2002), Sam Mendes’s Depression-era gangland tale starring Tom Hanks, Mr. Wolsky sought out Rabbit Goody, who runs a textile company in upstate New York, to manufacture a particularly heavyweight wool.
“We tested the current fabrics, and there was just no way to fake it,” Mr. Wolsky said in a 2024 interview with the website BAMF Style. “The weight dramatically affects the way the clothes move.”
By outfitting the title character (Warren Beatty) in “Bugsy,” Barry Levinson’s 1991 film about the mobster Bugsy Siegel, in Savile Row-ready chalk-stripe suits and houndstooth sports jackets, Mr. Wolsky underscored his ambitions to rise beyond his thug past.
Mr. Wolsky also joined the team when Mr. Beatty directed and starred in the 2016 movie “Rules Don’t Apply,” about the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes.
“Here’s the important thing about Albert: Just do what he says,” Mr. Beatty said in a panel discussion in 2016. “The word I use about Albert is ‘faultless.’ He seems always to have made the right choice.”
Albert Wolsky was born on Nov. 24, 1930, in Paris, the elder of two sons of Boris Wolsky, an electrical engineer, and Luba (Soloveichik) Wolsky.
His family fled the city after the Germans invaded France early in World War II. They went first to Marseille and then to Casablanca, Morocco, where they were detained before boarding a freighter to New York. They settled in the Inwood section near the northern tip of Manhattan, and his father started a successful travel agency.
Albert graduated from George Washington High School in 1946. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in English from the City College of New York in 1953, he was drafted into the Army and spent the final days of the Korean War stationed in Japan.
Returning to New York, he went to work at his father’s travel agency for a while, but ultimately pursued his love of fashion and theater, wrangling a job managing the costume house of Helene Pons, the highly regarded Broadway designer.
He eventually began designing, shifting his focus from theater to movies after being hired as the costume designer for the 1968 film adaptation of the Carson McCullers novel “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” starring Alan Arkin and Sondra Locke.
Mr. Wolsky’s partner of 39 years, James Mitchell — a dancer for the visionary choreographer Agnes de Mille and an actor who played the diabolical patriarch Palmer Cortlandt on the ABC soap opera “All My Children” for nearly three decades — died in 2010. Mr. Wolsky is survived by his brother, Gilbert.
Mr. Wolsky made his biggest mark on pop culture with the 1978 movie “Grease,” creating an outfit for Ms. Newton-John that captured in costume a crucial plot turn in the film’s climactic scene. Attempting to cement a romance with the bad-boy Danny Zuko (John Travolta), Ms. Newton-John’s character, Sandy, ditches her virginal pastels and pearls and shows up at the Rydell High School graduation carnival dressed as a bad girl every bit his equal, wearing a black leather jacket, skintight pants and vampy red heels.
“It was very clear from the beginning that she would have to change,” Mr. Wolsky said in a 2022 interview with The Guardian. “The idea was easy because she had been so girlish, so you had to go the other way — totally tight and sophisticated.”
The designer made much of the outfit himself, with the exception of the pants, which were vintage 1950s sharkskin, complete with a broken zipper. This meant that Mr. Wolsky had to stitch the actress into the women’s wear equivalent of sausage casing before the shoot.
Forget bathroom breaks: “I had to be very careful about what I ate and drank because it was so difficult to get out of them,” Ms. Newton-John wrote in her 2019 autobiography “Don’t Stop Believin’.”
At a charity auction in 2019, Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx, bought the pants for $162,500. The jacket fetched more than $240,000; the anonymous tech billionaire who made the winning bid was a fan and later returned it as a gift to Ms. Newton-John, who died in 2022, at 73.
“She called the jacket her ‘baby,’” Martin Nolan, the executive director of the auction house, told The Guardian, “and kept it all her career.”
Not all actors were as thrilled with Mr. Wolsky’s creations. And that was fine with him.
“When an actor says, ‘I wouldn’t wear that,’” he once said, he liked to respond: “Neither would I. That’s why I call it a costume.”
