Wolsky's family and industry colleagues are remembering him as a true artist whose craft elevated every project he touched. His seven Oscar nominations and two wins speak to decades of excellence.
Insiders note that Wolsky remained prolific until the end, with his final credit being 2022's Amsterdam with David O. Russell. He served four terms on Academy board of governors and donated 83 design drawings to the Margaret Herrick Library in 2009.
Wolsky died Saturday at his home in Hollywood Hills at age 95, born November 24, 1930 in Paris; His iconic Grease jacket fetched $243,000 at auction while the leather pants sold to Spanx founder Sara Blakely for $162,500.
Hollywood lost a true original. Wolsky understood that costume design isn't about pretty clothes—it's storytelling through fabric, and he told better stories than most directors.
Albert Wolsky, the French-born costume designer who won Oscars for All That Jazz and Bugsy and dressed Olivia Newton-John in those now-legendary tight black pants for Grease, died Saturday at his home in the Hollywood Hills. He was 95. Born in Paris on November 24, 1930, Wolsky's family fled to America during the German occupation of France during World War II—a trauma that would deeply inform his later work on films like Sophie’s Choice, where the flashback settings in a German concentration camp mirrored what some of his family members endured.
"We were the lucky ones," he said in a 2017 Costume Designers Guild interview. "We got here and a lot of our family got here, and some didn't." Wolsky graduated from City College of New York, ran his father's travel business for several years, then began an apprenticeship under costumer Helene Pons on the 1960 Broadway production of Camelot starring Julie Andrews and Richard Burton. His break into movies came courtesy of Theoni V.
Aldredge for The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in 1968. Across his decorated career spanning seven decades, Wolsky received seven Oscar nominations. He collaborated an extraordinary 11 times with director Paul Mazursky, including Harry and Tonto (1974), where Art Carney won best actor, and An Unmarried Woman (1978), starring Jill Clayburgh in one of her Oscar-nominated turns.
But in his own words, the most important film was Lenny (1974), Bob Fosse's biography of comedian Lenny Bruce starring Dustin Hoffman. "I really knew I had gone up one step to another level of learning and of opportunity, and it was an extraordinary job for me," Wolsky said during that 2017 interview. That experience paid off five years later with All That Jazz, where his vibrant costumes depicting the reality and fantasy worlds of Fosse's semiautobiographical life earned him his first Oscar.
His second Academy Award came for Barry Levinson's Bugsy in 1991—a film set in the 1940s where Wolsky spent his entire $1 million budget on ballgowns, tuxedos, silk shirts, satin ties, and imported rare Italian gabardine. On the podium, he thanked Levinson and producer-star Warren Beatty for creating an "elegant and impeccable taste and climate for us." He also dressed Meryl Streep for Sophie’s Choice in 1982—she thanked him by name during her best actress acceptance speech—and worked with both John and Joan Cusack on various projects.
His last two nominations came for Across the Universe (2007) and Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road (2009), while his final credit was Amsterdam (2022) with David O. Russell. But moviegoers will forever be grateful to Wolsky for putting Newton-John in those tight black sharkskin pants and leather jacket as she transformed into rebellious Sandy Olsson in Grease (1978).
In 2018, Newton-John recalled being stitched into the pants—their original 1950s zipper was broken—because they fit so perfectly. "When I walked out onto the set in them for the first time, I got quite the reaction—everyone stopped—because it was unlike anything I'd worn before," she said. Forty-one years later, Newton-John auctioned that iconic jacket for $243,000 to raise funds for her Cancer Wellness & Research Centre in Melbourne; the buyer donated it back to her.
The leather pants were purchased by Spanx founder Sara Blakely for $162,500. Wolsky served four terms on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science's board of governors, received the CDG's Award for Excellence in Contemporary Film in 2015, and donated 83 pencil and watercolor drawings spanning his designs from 1977-2007 to its Margaret Herrick Library. His partner of 39 years, dancer and actor James Mitchell (Palmer Cortlandt on All My Children), died in 2010.
