`From Russia With Love` costume designer Jocelyn Rickards dies aged 80

Jocelyn Rickards, who died on Thursday aged 80, was a well known costume designer for both stage and screen, and also won a certain notoriety as the mistress of the philosopher AJ Ayer, the novelist Graham Greene and, finally, the playwright John Osborne; the impresario Oscar Lewenstein once described her (with some admiration, one suspects) as "the wickedest woman in the world".

With Graham Greene, Jocelyn Rickards shared what she called "a dazzling sexual recklessness". On one occasion, they made love in a first-class carriage on a train from Southend to London; when the train slowed down to pass through a station, passengers standing on the platform were able to watch them in the act - reports The Telegraph.

"Every time we saw a horizontal surface," she said, "we'd look at each other and think, 'What a nice place to lie down'." When horizontal surfaces did not suggest themselves, they enjoyed visits to the cinema and the music hall.

Jocelyn Rickards - small and green-eyed with jet black hair - was already Ayers's mistress when she first encountered Greene, at an exhibition in 1951. There was an instant attraction between them, although she claimed that it was three years before they slept together because his other mistress, Catherine Walston, "kept getting in the way and making scenes".

Greene, she said, "had a terrible sense of guilt. He used to call himself a manic depressive, but I saw the Graham that no one else saw - full of gaiety, wit, immense charm and perfect manners. According to some of his so-called friends, you'd think he was never off his knees."

For his part, Greene wrote of her "outstanding capacity for friendship, rare in the jealous world of art and letters to which she belongs". Before publishing her autobiography, The Painted Banquet, in 1987, she sent him the manuscript to see if there was anything in it to which he objected. He replied: "Jocelyn, I'm not ashamed and I don't see why you should be." They remained friends until Greene's death in 1991.

Jocelyn Rickards, the daughter of a businessman, was born on July 29 1924 in Melbourne, Australia. She was sent to Melbourne Girls' Grammar School, but when she was only 14 she persuaded her parents to allow her to go to art school in Sydney, where she remained for six years. She immediately had two exhibitions, both of which sold out. Far from delighting her, this success gave her a feeling of "claustrophobia": "I had visions of having exhibitions every two years until I was ninety."

In January 1949 she arrived in London, accompanied by the fashion photographer Alec Murray. They had difficulty finding somewhere to live, so Jocelyn borrowed a mink coat and visited the estate agent for a new conversion in Eaton Square.

In one version of this story she recalled telling the agent that Murray and she were a duke and duchess who had just returned from abroad; although they were not rich, they needed a "good address". The estate agent was suitably impressed, and apologised for the fact that the apartment had only three living rooms and one bathroom. They got it for £8 a week. Always an excellent networker, Jocelyn soon found herself commissioned to paint a mural for Maureen Swanson.

Her introduction to designing costumes for the stage came through her friend Loudon Sainthill, who asked her to help him on a musical. In 1956 she made her first foray into films, as assistant to Roger Furse on the sets and men's costumes for The Prince and the Showgirl, starring Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe (Jocelyn Rickards described the experience as "like being an observer at a civil war. Olivier and Monroe did not get on, and both stars had rival entourages of sickening sycophants").

She was to go on to create the costumes for some of the best known films of her era: Ryan's Daughter; From Russia With Love; Sunday, Bloody Sunday; Antonioni's Blow-up; The Knack; and Morgan - A Suitable Case for Treatment.

Of Blow-Up, she said in 1977: "It was a real test of strength. (Antonioni) wanted me to predict fashion for two years ahead and create clothes which would just be verging on fashion when the film was released. I spent hours poring over books, trying to understand how fashion moves. Eventually I came up with leotards cut down to the base of the spine, a diamanté studded mini dress on top and a silver helmet. There were Fortuny pleated culottes and a cossack jacket, and several no-bra outfits.

"They felt right to me, but I couldn't get Antonioni to come to a fitting and give his opinion. It was only when the film was finally made and released that Antonioni went into ecstasies about my clothes. He said I should have got an Oscar."

Jocelyn Rickards was nominated for an Academy Award for her work on Morgan, A Suitable Case for Treatment; and she won a Bafta for Mademoiselle, which starred Jeanne Moreau.

On designing clothes for films, she said: "If clothes are well designed, they are probably unnoticeable, but should carry within them a number of messages, like what kind of school the character went to, what newspapers he or she reads, what political affiliations he has, what his sexual inclinations are, whether or not his financial position is secure - and if insecure, whether or not he cares.

All this saves valuable minutes of screen time." From the very first she had insisted on costuming "every actor, every tiny crowd part. It's the only way to get veracity. No matter if the people up front look right if the people in the back look wrong."

In 1968 Jocelyn Rickards worked on the film Alfred the Great, and it was on this picture that she met and fell in love with the director Clive Donner, responsible for films such as What's New, Pussycat?, The Caretaker and Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen; he became her second husband and brought her the emotional stability and happiness which had so far eluded her.

Jocelyn Rickards's long relationship with the philandering philosopher Freddie Ayer had begun when they met at a New Year's Eve party in 1949: "I think I'm going to have trouble with that little professor," was her first thought. Later she was able to write: "I loved him with a single-minded devotion."

When her relationship with him finished, she was 32; deciding that her life had "come to an end emotionally", she embarked on "two weeks of compulsive promiscuity, without desire and certainly without pleasure. Allowing myself to be bedded by at least seven men over 14 days I emerged at the end of it with strong feelings of self-loathing, and for the next six months lived a life of nun-like chastity."

Years after her affair with Ayer had ended, he came to lunch with her and Donner. When Ayer confided that he was afraid that he had become impotent, she responded: "Do you want to come upstairs and try it out?" He declined, explaining: "If it didn't work, you'd fall out of bed laughing."

Jocelyn Rickards met John Osborne in 1958, while he was married to Mary Ure. She designed the costumes for the films of his plays Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Entertainer (1960). She also worked on the stage production of his World of Paul Slicky in 1959.

In the second volume of his autobiography, Osborne wrote: "From the first moment I met (her)… I was intrigued by her. Neither sphinx nor tantrum child, she suggested a passionate intelligence and emotional candour. Small and dark, with wide appraising eyes, she had an almost comic air of uncombative lethargy which I found immediately attractive… Jocelyn was also vulnerably opinionated on almost any subject, as if driven by mischievous dissent… I found a warmth of irreverence in her drawled commentaries that was reckless and endearing. She knew only too well that she had at least one layer of skin missing when she exposed herself to the cutting edge of adversarial intellects more vain and brutal than her own."

Jocelyn Rickards is survived by Clive Donner. Her first husband was the painter Leonard Rosoman, whom she married after Osborne left her for the writer Penelope Gilliatt. She later admitted that she had never loved Rosoman - and that the £25 she paid for her divorce was "the best present I ever bought for myself".

Thanks to `Allen` for the alert.

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