14 Facts About Carl Toms

Carl Toms OBE was a British set and costume designer who was known for his work in theatre, opera, ballet, and film.

Carl Toms was born in 1927 at Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, England.

Carl Toms's parents were both tailors and neither of them entirely approved of Toms' choice to work in the theatre, preferring that he become an architect.

Carl Toms left Mansfield in the early 1940s to serve in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps during World War II.

Carl Toms left the Royal College of Art to train under Margaret Harris, George Devine and Michel Saint-Denis at the Old Vic School in the late 1940s.

Many of the masks and models Carl Toms made during this period are now on display at the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden which display this influence.

Carl Toms then worked with many English non-profit companies, including the Old Vic and the National Theatre, where he designed sets and costumes for Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, Marlowe's Edward II, Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs, and The Provok'd Wife for which Toms won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Set Design.

Carl Toms worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he designed the 1989 production of the Kaufman-Hart comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner and John Osborne's A Patriot for Me.

In 1969, Carl Toms was appointed consultant for the Investiture of the Prince of Wales, for which he received the Order of the British Empire.

In 1970, Carl Toms began to work in the American theatre and won a Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design in 1975 for his production design of Sherlock Holmes.

Carl Toms worked with Stoppard on such plays as Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Jumpers, and Hapgood among others.

Carl Toms worked on nine films during his career, including the cult classic One Million Years BC, starring Raquel Welch in a fur bikini of Carl Toms' devising; and other cave epics, including Prehistoric Women and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.

Carl Toms was the production designer for a 1968 film of The Winter's Tale.

Carl Toms died of emphysema on 4 August 1999 in Hertfordshire, England, aged 72.