Dorothy Jeakins, costume designer for motion pictures, theater, and television, was born in San Diego, California on January 11, 1914. Her father, George Tyndall Jeakins, was a stockbroker, and her mother, Sophia Maria (von Kempf) Jeakins was a designer. In 1931 Jeakins graduated from Fairfax High School in Los Angeles; in 1934 she graduated from the Otis Art Institute of Los Angeles.
Jeakins began her professional career by designing the costumes for the film Dr. Rhythm (1938). She received Academy Awards for her costumes for Joan of Arc (1948) and Night of the Iguana (1964) and shared the award with Edith Head, Elois Jenssen, Gile Steele, and Gwen Wakeling for the costumes in Samson and Delilah in 1949. She also received Academy Award nominations for her work on The Children's Hour (1961), The Music Man (1962), The Sound of Music (1965), Hawaii (1966), and The Way We Were (1973). Her other screen credits include The Greatest Show on Earth (1951), Stars and Stripes Forever (1952), My Cousin Rachel (1952), Niagara (1952), Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), The Ten Commandments (1954), Friendly Persuasion (1956), South Pacific (1957), Green Mansions (1958), Elmer Gantry (1960), The Fool Killer (1965), Finian's Rainbow (1968), True Grit (1969), The Molly Maguires (1969), Little Big Man (1970), Young Frankenstein (1975), and On Golden Pond (1981).
Jeakins has been equally active in the theater in New York and in California, and for the American Shakespeare Festival. Her New York theater credits include King Lear (1950), Too Late the Phalarope (1956), Major Barbara (1956), Taming of the Shrew (1957), Winesburg, Ohio (1958), The World of Suzie Wong (1958), Cue for Passion (1958), A Taste of Honey (1960), My Mother, My Father and Me (1963), Crystal and Fox (1970), Who's Happy Now (1970), and Othello (1971). In California she designed the costumes for Kiss Me Kate (1955); touring productions of Showboat (1960) and Carousel (1963); and for a Los Angeles Civic Light Opera production of The Sound of Music (1972). In addition she has designed the costumes for ten productions for the Theatre Group at UCLA. She has also designed the costumes for more than nine of the productions of the American Shakespeare Festival, Stratford, Connecticut, including The Taming of the Shrew (1956), Romeo and Juliet (1959), The Winter's Tale (1959), and All's Well That Ends Well (1959).
For television she has designed costumes for productions on ABC and CBS including Mayerling (1956), The Danny Kaye Show, and the play “Misalliance” presented on Playhouse 90.
In 1962 a Guggenheim Fellowship enabled her to live in Japan for a year and study Japanese theatrical costumes. In 1964 Jeakins did the documentary research for Voyage to America for the U.S. Pavilion at the New York World's Fair.
Jeakins is married and has two sons. As of 1974 the family resided in Santa Barbara, California.
