Patricia Zipprodt '46
Week of March 19, 2001

When Pat Zipprodt was a child, she used to draw paper dolls. But she didn't cut them out. Instead, she drew costumes for them. "I had a whole little cast of characters, and I would invent their plot and dress them for it," she told TCI magazine in 1994. You know what that's called: It's called costume designing."

That little girl with the paper dolls eventually became an award-winning costume designer whose work appeared in theater, on television, in film, in operas, and in ballets. During a career that spanned three decades, she worked with such Broadway legends as Jerome Robbins, Hal Prince, and Bob Fosse on shows that any theatergoer will recognize. Fiddler on the Roof. Cabaret. Zorba. 1776. Pippin. Chicago. Sweet Charity. Brighton Beach Memoirs. Dancers in the New York City Ballet, Ballet Hispánico, the Joffrey Ballet, and American Ballet Theater, among other companies, wore her creations. She was nominated for 11 Tony awards and won three (for Fiddler, Cabaret, and Sweet Charity). She received five Drama Desk Awards. In 1971, she received Wellesley's Alumnae Achievement Award. In 1992, she was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame; and in 1997, she received the Theatre Development Fund's Irene Sharaff Award for Lifetime Achievement in Costume Design. Oh, and by the way, she also designed the costumes for The Graduate. Yes, the movie, starring Dustin Hoffman, directed by Mike Nichols.

All this from someone who once thought she might use her art skills as a medical illustrator.

In the end, the medical-illustrator idea didn't last long. Zipprodt, who came to Wellesley after a year at Bradford Junior College, changed her mind once she discovered that she didn't like her zoology courses. After graduation, she eventually made her way to New York City, firmly committed to art but unsure of where to focus her talent. A New York City Ballet performance gave her the answer. Sitting in the fifth or sixth row, she was entranced by the dancers' costumes. "I saw these extraordinary colors," she remembered years later. "It wasn't like I was seeing yellow and green and red. It was very layered, color upon color, air and light filtering through it." She wanted, she said, to paint fabric.

From that point on, Zipprodt never veered from her course. She got a scholarship at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she learned to construct garments. She took a job picking up pins so that she could work for designer Charles James. She discovered that she needed a union card to work in stage design-and she needed to pass a test on the history of costume in order to qualify for the union card. "I hadn't studied anything about costumes," she told TCI magazine. "So I quit the job I had at the time, borrowed some money, and sat down and studied the entire history of costume, starting with the Egyptians and working my way through." She passed the test.

Another test came her way when Zipprodt was offered her first chance to be the sole costume designer for a Broadway show. The offer arrived just as she received another plum job opportunity: the chance to work as assistant to Irene Sharaff, a legendary costume designer. For Zipprodt, the choice was clear. She might yet be asked to design another show; she would never again have the chance to work with Sharaff. It was a choice she never regretted.

Over the course of her career, Zipprodt became known for painting fabrics, the very idea she'd had at the ballet that turned her toward costume design. She was also known for the intense research she put into her designs. In 1999, the New York Times described the months of background work she put into the costumes for Shogun, a musical set in 17th-century Japan: "Ms. Zipprodt traveled to Japan, studied the weaving industry in Kyoto that dated back to the world of Shogun, and visited and photographed Kabuki theaters, samurai-movie studios, gardens, castles, and textile mills."

In the early 1990s, Zipprodt's life took on a little of the drama of the shows she'd designed. Back in 1946, when she graduated from Wellesley, Zipprodt had returned to her native Chicago for a brief time. There, she fell in love with Lieut. Col. Robert O'Brien, Jr., who proposed to her. She turned him down. She wanted to go to New York to see where her artistic talent might lead her. And that was that until, 50 years later, O'Brien saw Zipprodt's biography in Playbill, the Broadway program/magazine. Now retired and a widower, O'Brien called Brandeis University, where, according to the Playbill biography, Zipprodt was an artist in residence. The school would not give him her phone number, so he asked to leave a message, which was later quoted in the New York Times: "Bob O'Brien called, and I want to marry her."

Zipprodt and O'Brien were married in 1993. They shared five years together, until O'Brien's death in 1998. Patricia Zipprodt died on July 17, 1999, of cancer. She was 74 years old.

Written by Liz Ruark