Oscar-winning Dublin Josie McAvin has been a set decorator on some of the most celebrated films of the last 40 years. She tells Michael Dwyer about a life in the movies.

The 16th Galway Film Fleadh, which opened on Tuesday night and continues until Sunday, pays timely tribute today to Josie McAvin, the only Irish person with the distinction of winning both an Oscar and its television equivalent, the Emmy.

The Academy Award came in 1986, for Out of Africa, and the Emmy followed eight years later for the mini-series, Scarlett, a sequel to Gone With the Wind. She has worked in the film industry as a set decorator since 1958 and collected her first two Oscar nominations within seven years of starting out.

Now aged 83 and looking a good deal younger, she was in radiant form as she reflected on her career when we met at her house in south Dublin this week. The walls of her beautifully decorated home are lined with paintings, one of them featuring her mother, and there are photographs all around of family, friends and colleagues.

Josie McAvin was born in Dublin. Her father worked in the cattle export trade and was the last elected high sheriff of Dublin. "He died when I was quite young," she says. "And I think he might have been horrified to learn that I went to work in the film industry."

She had been working as a physical education teacher for a few years when her cousin, Maureen Halligan, married Ronald Ibbs, and they started a theatre company.

"The PE work really wasn't for me," she says. "When Maureen asked me to come and work with them it was goodbye to that, and I toured with Maureen and Ronnie for two or three years."

In the 1950s she went to work as a stage manager at the Gate Theatre, during the reign of Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLíammóir.

"Hilton and Micheál were great to work with," she says, "but I loved the road, and when Maureen and Ronnie started touring America, I became their advance manager, going out ahead of them and setting everything up for them. I just loved it."

In 1958 Michael Anderson was preparing to direct the Black-and-Tans drama, Shake Hands With the Devil, which starred James Cagney and Dana Wynter, and a designer friend told her they were looking for somebody to deal with props for the Dublin shoot.

"I hadn't a clue about working in films, but I joined them," McAvin says.

She outlines the process of her job. "First, the production designer is employed by the director, and then the designer finds his crew and you're asked if he wants you to work on the film. You get the script and you read it. Then you do a breakdown of the script, noting every item you will need for every scene. Some designers do a perfectly detailed breakdown, which makes life easier for everyone. If you get on with these people, you will be asked to work with them again and again. If you don't get on, you may be gone within the first two weeks.

"I was never actually fired, but I came close to it a few times. But I worked on six films directed by Tony Richardson, and that was all through the same designer."

Her films with Richardson in the 1960s included The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Tom Jones, The Loved One and The Sailor from Gibraltar.

"The Long Distance Runner was my introduction to the new wave of directors that emerged in the early 1960s," says McAvin. "One day they were shooting a scene in the refectory where the boys were all eating, and Tony asked me to make sure I got a picture of the queen on the wall. Then a riot started shooting and the boys were all throwing pies at each other. One of the pies hit the portrait of the queen in the face, but Tony was delighted with this and decided to leave it in the picture."

McAvin also worked with John Huston on three films: Sinful Davey, A Walk With Love and Death, and his memorable swansong, The Dead, which she ranks along with Neil Jordan's Michael Collins as her two favourite productions from all the many films she has worked on.

"John only did Sinful Davey because he wanted to be in Ireland for the races," she says. "He had been offered a much bigger film at the time. One day we were shooting a scene in a cottage in the west of Ireland and he was inside, reading all the time - not the script, but books. When the track would be laid down and the set was ready, he would come out and suggest moving the track a little bit to the left, so he would have more time to read. It started raining very heavily and the water flooded into the cottage and out the back door, but John just stayed sitting there reading with not a bother on him."

Some other directors were not as easy to deal with as Richardson and Huston, and in 1969 she found herself working in the Alps with Michael Winner - and Oliver Reed and an elephant - on Hannibal Brooks.

"Michael is a very difficult man," McAvin says. "If you show any weakness whatsoever, he will go for it. There was one highly respected location manager on the film and Michael was a terror to him. The man ended up having a heart attack - and Michael came in the next day and said: 'There's one in hospital and there may be a lot more.'

"There was another time when we were doing a night shoot in the Alps and Michael asked us to find a house for a scene. The location manager found a house in the middle of nowhere and this man came out in his nightshirt. He didn't know what was going on, but with the help of an interpreter, we were allowed in and we started preparing the scene. Michael came in puffing his big cigar and asked me what was inside one of the rooms. We opened the door and there was an old woman in bed, and Michael asked me: 'What's she doing here?' I had to explain to him that she lived there."

As McAvin moved from one production to another - often working with her late sister, the props buyer, Sunny Mulligan - the recurring problem for her department was budgetary restrictions, and some productions had such tight budgets that she had to find whatever she could coax for free. A rare exception was Michael Cimino's seriously underestimated but notoriously extravagant 1980 western, Heaven's Gate, for which she was hired to work on the English section of the shoot.

"That was the only time when money did not matter," she says. "The designer, Maurice Fowler, told me that Cimino wanted this and that and whatever, and I asked him how much money I had been allocated. He told me not to even think about the money. It was not to be mentioned. Every little detail had to be exactly right."

The movie's overall budget ballooned and ballooned. "He brought down the studio, United Artists," McAvin says. "But it was a great film and it was magic to work on it."

Surely, I suggest, with so many tiny details needing attention, and so many props, some things can be overlooked. She nods and laughs, citing a scene in Sydney Pollack's film, Out of Africa.

"It's the very time when you feel sure you have everything, and then the director notices something's missing and you get blamed for holding up the shoot," she says. "The weather changed one day and it was getting very cloudy, and Sydney Pollack decided to shoot a sequence when Robert Redford's character first spends the night with Meryl Streep's character, Karen Blixen. When he's leaving the next morning, she gives him a present of a pen. I had ordered some pens from London and asked the costume designer to bring them with her to the set. But her department was in Nairobi, miles away from where we were shooting that day, and the pen happened to be left behind there.

"So when that scene was brought forward, the property master didn't have the pen with him. Sydney Pollack asked me where the pen was. I said I was sorry, that it was my fault, and they ordered a courier to collect it, which didn't take long. But Sydney Pollack told me that the film was costing so many million dollars and that this hold-up was going to cost so many thousand dollars. It's pressure all the time on a film set."

Before winning her Oscar for Out of Africa, she was nominated for Tom Jones in 1964 and again threeyears later for The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, the Cold War thriller in which Dublin doubled for Berlin and Checkpoint Charlie was built at Smithfield. It starred Richard Burton - who was accompanied by Elizabeth Taylor - and Claire Bloom.

"Liz never left the set, especially if Richard had scenes with Claire Bloom. Liz was a beautiful woman with marvellous eyes," McAvin says.

Coincidentally, when she was nominated for Tom Jones, the Oscar for set design went to the Taylor-Burton epic, Cleopatra. When she got the nomination for Out of Africa, she says that she and her art department colleagues were seated next to the designers of Akira Kurosawa's Japanese epic film, Ran.

"We were all congratulating the Japanese designer as we were sure he was going to win," she says. "The work he and his team did on that film was just wonderful. When Michael J. Fox announced that we had won, the first thing I did was to turn to the Japanese designer and tell him how sorry I was that he didn't win. I was in a total daze going up to collect the Oscar. It was all like a dream, but when I woke the next morning, there it was on the table."

Josie McAvin participates in a Galway Film Fleadh public interview, chaired by Lelia Doolan, at 2 p.m. today in the Town Hall Theatre, followed at 4 p.m. by a screening of Out of Africa