Robert F. Boyle

Infobox Actor
name = Robert F. Boyle
birthdate = birth date and age|1909|10|10
location = Los Angeles, California, United States
spouse = Bess Taffel
yearsactive = 1941–1991
academyawards = Academy Honorary Award
2008 Lifetime Achievement

Robert F. Boyle (born October 10, 1909) is an Academy Award-winning American art director and production designer.

Born in Los Angeles, Boyle trained as an architect, graduating from the University of Southern California (USC). When he lost his job in that field during the Great Depression, Boyle found work in films as an extra. In 1933 he was hired as a draftsman in the Paramount Pictures art department, headed by supervising art director Hans Dreier. He went on to work on a variety of pictures as a sketch artist, draftsman and assistant art director before becoming an art director at Universal Studios in the early 1940s.

Boyle collaborated several times with Alfred Hitchcock, first as an associate art director for "Saboteur" (1942) and later as a full-fledged production designer for "North by Northwest" (1959), "The Birds" (1963), and "Marnie" (1964).

Boyle's additional credits include "It Came from Outer Space", "Cape Fear", "In Cold Blood", "Fiddler on the Roof", "Portnoy's Complaint", "Winter Kills", "Mame", "W.C. Fields and Me", "The Shootist", "Private Benjamin", "Staying Alive", and "Troop Beverly Hills".

During the course of his career, Boyle was nominated four times for the Academy Award for Best Art Direction but never won. In 1997 he received the Art Directors Guild's Lifetime Achievement Award, and he was voted an Honorary Academy Award by the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, "in recognition of one of cinema's great careers in art direction," which he received during the 80th Academy Awards ceremony on February 24, 2008 [ [http://ampas.org/press/pressreleases/2007/07.12.12a.html Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences press release, December 12, 2007] ] . At the age of 98, Boyle became the oldest winner ever of an Honorary Award in the history of the Academy Awards.

Boyle was the subject of the Academy Award-nominated documentary short "The Man on Lincoln's Nose" (2000).

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*imdb name|id=0102327|name=Robert F. Boyle