American film art director and production designer, who originally trained as an architect, graduating from the University of Southern California, before breaking into film work. He received an Academy Honorary Award in 2008.
Beginning with Cecil B. DeMille’s 1936 film The Plainsman, Boyle 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). Denied permission to shoot footage on Mount Rushmore, Hitchcock turned to Boyle to create realistic replicas of the stone heads.
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 24 February 2008.
At the age of 98, Boyle became the oldest winner ever of an Honorary Award in the history of the Academy Awards. In ill health and arriving to the ceremony in a wheelchair, Boyle insisted on walking onstage, alongside actor Nicole Kidman, to receive the honour. He was the subject of the Academy Award-nominated documentary short The Man on Lincoln’s Nose (2000).
Boyle and his wife, actor Bess Taffel, were unable to have children of their own, so they adopted two girls. Bess Taffel Boyle died on 21 July 2000. He died on 1 August 2010 in Los Angeles due to natural causes at age 100.
Link to Wikipedia biography