Mary Grant Price

Unlike most women Hollywood designers, who preferred the big frocks of costume movies, Mary Grant Price, who has died aged 85, had a gift for dressing men in a heightened contemporary reality.

There were the crumpled linen and soiled singlets of We're No Angels (1955), and, memorably, those heavy-rimmed glasses for Burt Lancaster's JJ Hunsecker in Sweet Smell Of Success (1957). She chose that topstitched overcoat Tony Curtis's Sidney Falco wore with its collar up, or left at home so that he would not have to pay cloakroom tips.

Price outfitted the convincing cigarette and hatcheck girls, too - the Billy Rose revue showgirl style transposed to everynight life. She also worked with Lancaster on Separate Tables (1958) and the period piece The Devil's Disciple (1959).

The daughter of a sea captain, Price grew up in Shanghai and Victoria, British Columbia. Her interest was always in theatre; she studied design in New York and was apprenticed in costume. After seeing his work on stage, she wrote to the Broadway designer Raoul Pene du Bois - and he took her on.

For almost the next decade, she was on the payroll of du Bois and Miles White as they costumed Broadway shows, notably the musicals Oklahoma and DuBarry Was A Lady. Her own first solo show - launched before she was even 30 - was Cole Porter's Mexican Hayride in 1944, notable for its lady bullfighter's kit. She also had a sideline in feathers and respectable spangles for Billy Rose's girls.

Both of Price's mentors had worked in Hollywood, and she transferred there in 1945. By 1948, she was sketching pastiche crinolines and stovepipe hats for the movie Up In Central Park, when she met, and fell for, hat-wearer, ham, and bon viveur Vincent Price, who was in the cast.

They married, later had a daughter, Victoria, and lived in Beverly Hills, in a handsome house with an imaginative decor. Vincent Price collected paintings, ceramics and furniture, and his wife enjoyed arranging them rather more than she liked the parties and the famous guests. In 1951, they gave 90 works to found an art gallery on the campus of East Los Angeles community college, the first teaching art collection of its kind, and supported it afterwards with money and gifts.

In the 1960s, the Prices attempted to market their lifestyle, producing a treasury of American recipes - and another of dishes from famous hotels - illustrated with photographs of valuable impedimenta from their home. They also went into business with the mail order firm Sears, Roebuck to sell fine art to a mass market, and, in 1967, chose antique early American pottery, wallpaper, fabrics and tinware for skilled reproduction under the Sears "national treasures" label.

While shooting a movie in 1973, Vincent walked off with his co-star, Coral Browne. After a divorce the following year, Mary founded her own company, Mansions International, to buy up and refurbish substantial houses in Los Angeles, Santa Fe and Honolulu. She made a new reputation for herself, cleverly handling interior magnificence. She did not do bijou homes, although she herself lived for a long time in the downmarket San Fernando valley.

Mary Grant Price, designer, born 1916; died March 2 2002

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