Tony Strong, prolific scenic artist who worked with Ken Russell, Monty Python, Wings and Ridley Scott

Tony Strong, who has died aged 102, was a scenic artist who created convincing worlds for films, theatre and television; he was equally adept at delicate foreground details such as the tarot cards in the Roger Moore film Live and Let Die as he was at enormous backcloths, such as the 1314ft-long, 40ft-high snowscape for Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express, or the eerie mountains behind the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.

He was close friends with Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe of the Goons, through whom he met the Monty Python team, and in 1976 they got him to paint a hanging pub-like sign for the Pythons’ new premises in Neal’s Yard, Covent Garden. Strong produced a gleaming red mouth, complete with teeth and lashing tongue, like the Rolling Stones logo. On the side facing the Neal’s Yard organic shop, it read “Neal’s Yard Abattoir”; on the other side, the lips were chapped and the teeth were broken and blackened, and it read: “The State of the British Film Industry”.

Strong was Ken Russell’s go-to scenic artist, staring with his breakthrough Women in Love (1969) and The Boy Friend, The Music Lovers and The Devils (all 1971), filling his films with everything from murals to Old Masters. For David Lynch’s cult classic The Elephant Man (1980) he recreated a Victorian theatre, but had to decline Lynch’s invitation to lunch at Britain’s very first McDonald’s so that he could paint the banners for the Elephant Man’s circus tent.

Strong was immensely hard-working, which led to a nasty moment when, beavering alone over the weekend on the set of Live and Let Die, the shark tank sprung a leak. It took him some hours to get hold of the shark handler.

In total he worked on 35 feature films – including John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), The Return of the Soldier (1982), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) and Ridley Scott’s Legend (1985) – and 700 television productions, as well as commercials and music videos. Paul and Linda McCartney recruited him to make the Hockney-ish backdrops for the first tour of Wings, which he based on the paintings and furniture in their Cheyne Walk house to make them feel at home. He also created vast sets for The Who.

He had a flair for invention. Roger Law, creator of Spitting Image, observed Strong painting trees for one of his “insanely large” film backdrops. “I was astonished when he dipped a piece of wood with quite a number of attached sponges into paint and then pushed it on to the blank canvas,” recalled Law. “Lo and behold, you had one complete branch of a tree… then he would roll the canvas upwards and start on the rest of the tree.”

The Murder on the Orient Express backcloth, which stretched around the biggest stage at Elstree Studio, was painted not on canvas but on acrylic cloth, which could be backlit by hundreds of arc lamps – the first implementation of the technique in cinema.

The idea dated back to the Second World War, when Strong, on shore leave from the Merchant Navy in New York, had found temporary work painting advertisements in Times Square. Back in Britain, in the 1960s he patented a method of painting on acrylic billboards, which were made by his company Lumigraph Transparencies Ltd and seized upon by advertisers in Piccadilly Circus.

He also invented a way of painting realistic carpets and tapestries, producing over 200 for hire in period dramas. One can be seen in a recent music video by Florence + the Machine, and several more in the BBC’s adaptation of Wolf Hall.

But it took all his resourcefulness to break into the heavily unionised film world in the first place, even though he had grown up on sets. His father Percy Strong was head of cinematography at Gaumont Studios in Shepherd’s Bush, and had met his wife Gwen, a singer, on the top deck of the bus, where both were scouring the job section of Variety.

Anthony Strong was born in Maida Vale on October 7 1921. His younger brother, Geoff, would also become a scenic artist.

Tony’s early life was like Cinema Paradiso, except instead of presiding over the projection booth he had the run of the entire studio. The young David Lean was his father’s camera assistant, and the director Bernard Vorhaus was bringing new ideas from Hollywood, notably the high-speed car chase. Percy filmed the first English example, in The Last Journey (1936), featuring a runaway train streaking through a station, with young Tony one of the passengers who scatter in horror.

He helped his father by running cans of newsreel to the laboratories in Wardour Street, avoiding the gangs employed by their rivals, Pathé. He then found his vocation watching two scenic artists with long sticks and charcoal on the end of it, sketching something enormous on the floor, which gradually materialised as a train. He was tutored by his uncle, who painted the titles onto film frames – work that dried up with the advent of the Talkies.

Aged 14, Tony had to leave school to find work because his father’s leg wound from the Somme meant that he could no longer lift the heavy camera. His plan was to join the Merchant Navy and work his passage to Australia, where he had read that the studios would soon eclipse Hollywood. This, of course, turned out to be “fake news” so he kept on sailing. By the time the Second World War broke out he had been to Australia via India and South Africa several times.

He was assigned to RMS Queen Elizabeth, sailing through U-boat-infested waters in the Battle of the Atlantic. He later reflected that he must have had 19 lives since in every convoy he was part of, either the ship before his or the ship after his did not make it.

Painting portraits of his fellow servicemen brought him a useful income, which greatly increased when the Americans arrived. He would paint pin-up girls, Disney characters or girlfriends on the backs of the US air crews’ A-2 leather bomber jackets, cutting a deal with the captain to let him dry them in the Queen Elizabeth’s medical room.

The ship’s stopovers in New York were eventful: in 1942, the Normandie sank in the next-door berth, while on land he witnessed the panic of the first practice black-out, in which some were trampled to death; in 1945, he saw a B-25 crash into the side of the Empire State Building, and he was in Times Square for the VE Day celebrations.

Postwar, invigorated by the shows he had seen on Broadway, he began painting scenery in London under the tutelage of Feliks Topolski. After working for Oliver Messel and Cecil Beaton at the Royal Opera House, he joined the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1947, painting all the backcloths for its grand re-opening with the musical Oklahoma, which he had seen several times on Broadway. He then became head painter at the venerable Macklin Street Scenic Painting Room.

His peers in the theatre thought he was mad to join the fledgling television industry in the 1960s but he realised it would be a “back door” into motion pictures. His one foray into film so far had led to the crew walking out because he did not have a union card.

He eventually got one through Rediffusion, where his credits included The Goon Show’s ill-starred transfer to television, Secombe and Friends – which the crew thought hysterical but the studio head did not – No Hiding Place and Tales of the Unexpected.

In 1943, during the Blitz, he married a nurse called Joan Chilman, known as “Chili”; he was 21, she was 19, and their honeymoon was a day at the London Zoo. Their marriage lasted almost 80 years until Chili’s death in 2020. The widowed Strong got on his scooter during Covid and raised nearly £100,000 for NHS workers and carers.

He is survived by their daughter Vanessa, an artist, and their son Graham, a documentary-maker.

Tony Strong, born October 7 1921, died August 10 2024