- “He loved working for Disney and was a great source of information for everybody.”
- ―Peter Ellenshaw
Emile Kuri was a Lebanese-Mexican set decorator and interior designer, whose work with Disney gained him Academy Award nominations for The Absent-Minded Professor, Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, winning for the latter.
Born in Cuernavaca, Mexico, to Lebanese parents who eventually moved to escape a revolution. They soon settled in Los Angeles where he attended Chaminade College Preparatory School. When he was 12 years old, his father died, and needing to support his mother and siblings he found work at a furniture store in Hollywood. Having a sense and ability with design, Kuri decorated store front windows and home furnishings.
While decorating the home of director Hal Roach, he was approached by him to do set design for his comedy film The Topper. He soon made a name for himself in Hollywood where he worked with top directors, like Alfred Hitchcock, David O. Selznick, William Wyler, George Stevens, and Frank Capra with films, such as Spellbound, Rope, The Trouble with Harry, North by Northwest, Shane, A Place in the Sun, It's a Wonderful Life, The Heiress, I Remember Mama, The Actress, Small Town Girl, The War of the Worlds, Executive Suite, Carrie, Silver Queen, Tora! Tora! Tora!, and The Sting.
After he was hired by Walt Disney in 1952 as chief decorator for Disney Studios, Kuri designed Captain Nemo's submarine headquarters for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He would set design much of the live-actions films for the company, such as Pollyanna, Babes in Toyland, The Parent Trap, That Darn Cat, The Love Bug, and many episodes of the Disneyland anthology series. He would later supervise the decorating of the Disney exhibits at the 1964 New York World's Fair.
With his sense of style and attention to detail, Kuri also designed the interior and exterior settings for Disneyland in Anaheim, and served as a consultant at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando. and helped decorate company executive offices. Among his other contributions were the Disney Firehouse apartment, the Royal Suite (the Disney apartment in New Orleans Square), the sailing ship Columbia, Club 33, Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln and the Plaza Inn, Walt's apartment in Town Square. He retired from the company in 1974 but would supervise select Disney productions in the 1980s, such as The Last Flight of Noah's Ark and Touchstone Pictures' Splash.
Kuri also served on the governing board of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and was decorator for the annual Academy Awards show for 25 years. He died in 2000 at the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital in Woodland Hills. He was survived by children, Frederick, John, Elizabeth; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Filmography[]
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- Kuri once said of set design, "The most difficult thing is to make a set not look like a set, but like a home, as if the people just walked out."
- With his win for The Heiress, Kuri became the first Arab to ever win an Academy Award.
- According to legend, Kuri witnessed a car accident on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles where it dislodged an antique street lamp from its base. Kuri, paid $5 to the police for the ornate lamp post and even offered to haul it away himself. That lamp post is the base for Town Square's 65 foot flagpole.
- He also was honored by the Los Angeles Furniture Mart with its Golden Chair award for his innovative whitewashing of Spanish antiques in The Parent Trap.
- He has a window with his name on Main Street in Disneyland (above the Market Street listed as "Interior Decorator") and Walt Disney World (on the second floor of the Emporium listed as managing "Exterior Decorators").
- His son, John, created the documentary My Dad: His Remarkable Life to showcase Kuri's achievements in the film industry and as a person.
