Bill Gold, one of Hollywood’s best-known creators of film posters, has died aged 97.
The veteran illustrator had a hand in more than 2,000 posters, including those for Casablanca, Dial M for Murder, and Dirty Harry.
Mr Gold began work at the film production company Warner Brothers in the 1940s.
The endangered art of the hand-drawn movie poster lost one of its leading practitioners yesterday, as Bill Gold, creator of iconic movie posters for such films as Casablanca (1942), Dial M For Murder (1954), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Dirty Harry (1971), The Exorcist (1973), The Sting (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), andUnforgiven (1992), has died. A spokeswoman for his family says that Gold died in a Connecticut hospital on Sunday from complications of Alzheimer’s. He was 97.
Born in Brooklyn, Gold studied illustration at New York City design college Pratt Institute before beginning his career at the Warner Bros. art department in Manhattan in the early 1940s. His second-ever assignment at the age of 21 was the iconic poster for Casablanca (1942), for which he lifted an image of a gun from the poster for another Humphrey Bogart film, High Sierra (1941). After returning from a three-year tour of duty making films for the U.S. Army towards the end of World War II, Gold returned to Warner Bros., where he worked until starting his own ad firm in the early ‘60s, where he employed another iconic illustrator, Bob Peak.
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