Catherine Martin

Catherine Martin (born 26 January 1965) is an Australian costume designer, production designer and set designer. She has received numerous accolades throughout her career spanning over three decades, including four Academy Awards, six BAFTA Awards, and a Tony Award. Martin is best known for frequent collaborations with her husband, filmmaker Baz Luhrmann, including Strictly Ballroom (1992), Romeo + Juliet (1996), Moulin Rouge! (2001), Australia (2008), The Great Gatsby (2013), and Elvis (2022). Martin gained international recognition with her first major film credit alongside Luhrmann on his feature directorial debut, Strictly Ballroom, which later became the first part of the "Red Curtain Trilogy". For her exceptional work on the film's aesthetic, she earned two BAFTAs for Best Costume Design and Best Production Design, among other accolades. Martin received her first Oscar nomination for art direction in the second part of the trilogy, Romeo + Juliet. She then collected both the Academy Award for Best Costume Design and the Academy Award for Best Production Design for creating the visuals in Curtain's final installment, Moulin Rouge! Martin is the second woman to win multiple Oscars in a single year and the first to accomplish this feat more than once after winning the same categories for The Great Gatsby. Having won four awards out of nine nominations, she holds the record for the most Oscar wins of any Australian. Early life and education Martin was born on January 26, 1965, in Lindfield, New South Wales, to a French mother and an Australian father, both academics who met at the Sorbonne; her father was pursuing his expertise in 18th-century French literature, and her mother was studying mathematics at university. She and her brother grew up in Sydney but spent a lot of time with their grandparents in France's Loire Valley, visiting "every art gallery, every museum" along the way. Martin was fascinated from an early age by the vintage clothing parades occasionally thrown by her Australian grandmother and her church friends. She would beg her parents to take her to London's Victoria and Albert Museum so she could dig through the costume section, and recalled "being blown away by the costume gallery, being able to see a pleated lace ruff in reality" when she finally got there. Her mother taught her to use a sewing machine at age 6, and by age 15 she was creating her own patterns in order to make herself dresses.