‘His team loved and revered him’: Harry Potter director David Yates pays tribute to production designer Stuart Craig

Craig was an artist of literally towering achievements, in films from The English Patient to Harry Potter, whose kindness won the loyalty of the huge teams he led
• Stuart Craig, Oscar-winning production designer, dies aged 83

Stuart Craig was a softly spoken, gentle soul – full of grace, tall, slender, willowy, polite and kind – but despite appearances he masterfully stewarded a gigantic industrial creative machine. The art department for Harry Potter was huge, and Stuart guided teams across multiple skill sets – concept artists, prop makers, construction workers, painters and decorators, plasterers and model makers – to realise the fabric and architecture of JK Rowling’s world.

It wasn’t unusual to be standing with him on one of his enormous inspiring sets, the Magical Congress of the United States of America in New York or the courtyard of Hogwarts, which towered multiple storeys high, and for Stuart to suddenly be distracted and laser-focused on the texture of a tile, or the colour of the paint that had been applied to a window frame.