RIP: JOHN MOLLO, OSCAR-WINNING STAR WARS COSTUME DESIGNER, DIES AT 86.

Star Wars went on to become the highest-grossing film of 1977 and received 10 Oscar nominations (and a Special Achievement award). Mollo won for best costume design.

“As you see, the costumes from Star Wars are really not so much costumes as a bit of plumbing and general automobile engineering,” he said upon receiving his Oscar, flanked by his creations of Darth Vader, Princess Leia and Stormtroopers.

Mollo won a second Academy Award in 1983 for his work on Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (he shared the award with Bhanu Athaiya, the first Indian to win).

His military knowledge first came in handy as an adviser on Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) and Barry Lyndon (1975) — both collected Oscars for costume design.

After the success of Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope, Mollo’s next film was another science fiction blockbuster: Alien (1979).

Mollo’s brother Andrew produced and co-directed one of the most audacious self-financed debut films ever made, 1964’s It Happened Here, which decades before Robert Harris’ Fatherland or the Amazon production of The Man in the High Castle imagined if Germany had won the war and conquered England. Its production began in 1956, and eventually Stanley Kubrick (who would later hire John Mollo for Barry Lyndon) donated leftover film stock from Dr. Strangelove to help bring it to fruition. Peter Suschitzky, the film’s cinematographer, would later go on to be the director of photography on a little movie called The Empire Strikes Back.