For over 70 years, Robert Fletcher ‘45 has designed costumes and sets for a remarkably diverse portfolio of stage, film, and television productions. He is probably best known for his work on the first four Star Trek films (covered in a previous entry here), but that is only a small portion of his long, still ongoing career. Luckily, he’s just published his memoirs (A Trunk Full of Yak Hair Or How the Klingons Got Their Look) which recount, often with great humor and candor, projects with Orson Welles, Dean Martin, George Balanchine, and William Faulkner to name a few.
Fletcher got his start on the stage at Harvard with groups such as the Harvard Dramatic Club and Harvard Veterans’ Theatre Workshop. The Harvard Theatre Collection has benefitted from that relationship over the years through his generous donation of around 150 boxes of production material. Nearing graduation, he co-founded the Brattle Theatre Company in Cambridge, a precursor to the regional theater companies of today.
Fletcher designed and acted in a whirlwind of performances as part of the Brattle. Although productions often included high profile guest stars like Julie Haydon, John Carradine, and Zero Mostel, their star power never took away from the core members of the company, who consistently drew rave reviews and full houses.
From Cambridge, Fletcher moved on to work for both the New York stage and NBC, designing costumes for such varied productions as Welles’ Lear at City Center and The Mary Martin Show, a TV musical extravaganza. His entry in ibdb.com includes 29 productions, though that’s certainly not his entire output. He later moved to California, where he continued working on stage and television, and began a film career that would include designing the costumes for The Last Star Fighter, Fright Night, and the Ringo Starr comedy Caveman.
Even after his “retirement” to New Mexico in 1988, he’s continued working. Most recently, he contributed to the HBO series Rome and has been hard at work on Bollywood projects. At 91 years of age, his creative output remains stellar, including his memoirs, which cover a golden era of the stage, the burgeoning medium of television, and a number of iconic films.
Micah Hoggatt, Reference Librarian, Houghton Library contributed this post.