Milena Canonero

Milena Canonero (born 1 January 1946) is an Italian costume designer, who has worked for both film and stage productions. She has won four Academy Awards for Best Costume Design, and been nominated for the award nine times.

She is married to actor Marshall Bell.

Born in Turin, Italy, Canonero studied art, design history and costume design in Genoa. She then moved to England, where she began working in small theatre and film productions. While designing for commercials in London, she met many film directors.

Her first major film work as a costume designer was in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) after having met Kubrick on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). She worked with Kubrick again on Barry Lyndon (1975), for which she won her first Oscar with Ulla-Britt Söderlund, and The Shining (1980). Her second Oscar win was for Chariots of Fire (1981), directed by Hugh Hudson.

Canonero has also designed the costumes for several stagings directed by Otto Schenk, such as Il trittico (Puccini, Vienna State Opera 1979), As You Like It (Shakespeare, Salzburg Festival 1980), Die Fledermaus (Strauss, Vienna State Opera 1980), Andrea Chénier (Giordano, Vienna State Opera 1981), and Arabella (Strauss, Metropolitan Opera 1983). For director Luc Bondy she created the costumes for new productions of Puccini's Tosca (Metropolitan Opera, 2009), and of Euripides' Helena (Burgtheater, Vienna, 2010).