Later this month Showcase airs Women He’s Undressed a must see film about an Australian that very few people know about.
Highly acclaimed Australian director Gillian Armstrong traces the life Orry Kelly, the young boy from the coastal town of Kiama, NSW who made the daring escape out of subrubia and headed to the anything goes world of 1920’s New York, to eventually become Hollywoods most sort after costume designer during the golden age of film.
Orry-Kelly won three Academy Awards® and was nominated for a fourth when he worked as the head of Warner Bros costume department during the richest period of American film history, and was a key influence on mass culture through his costume patents between 1930-1960.
Throughout his career Kelly worked on an astonishing 285 motion pictures and designed for legends like Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, Rosalind Russell, Errol Flynn, Natalie Wood, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and many more luminaries of the silver screen. His films included classics like Some Like It Hot, Casablanca, Oklahoma, An American in Paris, The Maltese Falcon, Gypsy, 42nd Street and Now, Voyager.
Through re-created scenes and extensive interviews with some of the movie industry’s key players including actresses Jane Fonda and Angela Lansbury both of whom worked with Orry, and costume designers Catherine Martin and Ann Roth it is revealed he was an outrageous and incredibly witty designer whose extraordinary and unparalleled talent created some of Hollywood’s most iconic looks in film with stars like Bette Davis whom he counted as close friends along with a complicated lifetime friendship with actor Cary Grant.
Respected Australian actor Darren Gilshenan stars as Orry Kelly who narrates the documentary and appears in recreated flashback scenes alongside actress Deborah Kennedy. Women He’s Undressed is directed by Gillian Armstrong with a screenplay by Katherine Thomson, and is produced by Damien Parer.
8.30pm Sunday February 28 on Showcase
