Bernard Robinson
Production Designer
1912 - 1970
Bernard Robinson designed some of Hammer's finest productions until his career with the studio was brought to an abrupt halt by his premature death in 1970. The Liverpool-born artist managed to give Hammer's films an expensive look working from a minimal budget. He made the most of the limited materials available -- not to mention the limited space at Bray Studios -- by ingeniously disguising previously used sets for different films, sometimes even for different scenes within the same film. The hallways of the castle in Horror of Dracula (1958, pictured), for instance, doubled as the Holmwood crypt, and Dracula's crypt from the same year was recycled as Frankenstein's laboratory in Revenge of Frankenstein (also 1958).
Perhaps his biggest challenge was the 1962 Phantom of the Opera, which required a huge water-tank to be constructed for the Phantom's underground lair. Once again he proved his ability to work miracles out of the barest of resources, creating one of Hammer's most memorable and haunting setpieces.
His sets on the Bray backlot were mammoth works of construction that would usually be employed for two or three films before being replaced. Among his best were the 1958 Castle Dracula/Baskerville Hall for Horror of Dracula and The Hound of the Baskervilles, respectively, the gothic castle doubling for Dracula, Prince of Darkness and Rasputin, the Mad Monk in 1965, and perhaps supremely, the 19th-century Cornish village that provided the setting for The Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile in 1966.
