THEATRICAL MILLINERY
before been able to visit. “I was so hungry for all this stuff,” she explains. After about three years, she run out of money. She sold her house and moved to a new place, where she still lives and works nowadays. Jane was now in her fifties and had to go back and find a job. For almost four years she worked in the shop of the BBC World Service, a job she loved. “I was in London one day and ran into Mary Husband, one of the costume designers at the BBC. She asked me where I’d been all those years, as I’d previously done a lot of BBC shows. I ended up doing three cloches for Twiggy and another show. After that I was ready to come back and start doing hats again.”
Moreover, in 1996 Jane started teaching and discovered she had a real talent for it, as she was adept at tuning in to the students’ creative processes. She taught theatre millinery for more than 20 years at several colleges, including Wimbledon College of Arts, Rose Bruford College, Northbrook College, Arts University Bournemouth, and Liverpool School of Art and Design. “Adult teaching is wonderful,” she says, “and another nice thing is that you can earn some extra money. All in all, you could say that every brick in my house is paid off with a hat. When the huge pressure was finally off me to pay off my mortgage, I found that I didn’t want to do the teaching anymore.”
As the work kept coming, Jane really threw herself into it. “I started to get really big jobs, like Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady about Margaret Thatcher. I made all these hats for her and I did a few things with Irish costume designer Consolata Boyle. And there was Michael O’Connor, who I did The Duchess with. He used me as a hat maker all the time as well, right up till now. Something like The Duchess is just a dream come true, it’s the one I liked to do the most. I made ten hats, all her hats but one. It’s gorgeous to see your own hats on the big screen. Whenever
a movie comes out, my friends can’t come with me because I will be poking them all the time saying ‘Did you see that, I made that!’ Recently I did all the Laurel & Hardy bowlers for the film Stan & Ollie. Guy Speranza, the designer, gave me a credit and a special thanks. With Master and Commander I didn’t do Russell Crowe’s hats, but lots of the other hats. With a big movie, there can be five or more hatters.”
When making a particular piece, Jane goes beyond using just wooden blocks. “If you do theatre, you can’t buy a new wooden shape when you have to do something in a week. I have about 400 blocks in my loft, most of them from polystyrene. I carved all of them myself and used them for many years. Sometimes I use a wooden block as a base and I modify it with polystyrene. I have crowns, tricorns, and the big cavaliers.” She specialises in the bicorn, such as the one she did for George V in the upcoming Kingsman film: “I do these lovely old bicorn blocks, they are the real thing.” Nowadays she does mostly men’s headwear. For the fittings, Jane works with the designer and the costume supervisor. She recently did Sir Ian McKellen in All Is True, the 2018 film directed by Sir Kenneth Branagh. “I made all the principals’ hats and also did all the fittings myself, but you don’t always get to speak to the actors. With theatre actors I can usually measure it myself. Loads of people give the wrong measurements; most of the time they measure too high on the head. If a hat doesn’t fit, it’s a disaster because you will notice. I make a big noise if I don’t get the proper measurements – it’s ever so important.” Jane continues: “I make everything here in my own studio. Usually the designer comes to me. They phone you first and ask you whether you are busy, and they want you to say no, of course. Next they will tell you they have no money, then they talk about what they are doing. Everything they say to me I
Hat used in Noël Coward’s play A Song at Twilight
may 2019 | 49
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