The distinguished film set decorator, Josie McAvin, has died at the age of 85. She was the only Irish person with the distinction of winning both an Oscar - for Out of Africa in 1986 - and its television equivalent, the Emmy, for the 1994 mini-series Scarlett, the sequel to Gone With the Wind.
A native of Dublin, she first worked as a physical education teacher but turned to theatre when her cousin, Maureen Halligan, married Ronald Ibbs and started a theatre company with him. In the 1950s Ms McAvin was employed as a stage manager at the Gate Theatre during the reign of Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir.
She started in the film industry in 1958, in Michael Anderson's Black and Tans drama, Shake Hands With the Devil, which starred James Cagney and Dana Wynter. She went on to work with some of the world's leading directors, making three films with Tony Richardson, including Tom Jones, which earned Ms McAvin her first Oscar nomination in 1964. She received her second nomination three years later for The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, the Cold War thriller in which Dublin doubled for Berlin, and won her Oscar on the third nomination for Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa.
Her career also included three films directed by John Huston, among them his final film, The Dead. In an interview with The Irish Times last summer, she ranked that film along with Neil Jordan's Michael Collins as her two favourite productions of the many films on which she had worked. Among her many other film credits are David Lean's Ryan's Daughter, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, Jack Clayton's The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and Lewis Gilbert's Educating Rita.
Ms McAvin's funeral Mass will be at 10 a.m. today in St Patrick's Church, Monkstown, Co Dublin, followed by her removal to Glasnevin Cemetery.