Natalie Kalmus

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Natalie Kalmus (née Dunfee, 1878 - November 15, 1965), was the wife of Technicolor founder Herbert T. Kalmus from July 23, 1902 to June 22, 1922, although they continued to live together until 1944. She was born and died in Boston, Massachusetts, although one source says she was born in Virginia.

Originally a catalog model, then an art student, Kalmus is famous for having been the original Technicolor Supervisor on virtually all of the live-action Technicolor features released from 1934 to 1949, making sure that costumes, sets and lighting were adjusted for the camera's sensitivities. She was generally regarded as a nuisance, but her services were contractually part of Technicolor's services. In her attempts to keep colors from being used garishly onscreen, she was accused of going to the other extreme. Producer David O. Selznick complained in a memo during the making of Gone with the Wind:

[T]he technicolor experts have been up to their old tricks of putting all sorts of obstacles in the way of real beauty. . . . We should have learned by now to take with a pound of salt much of what is said to us by the technicolor experts. . . . I have tried for three years now to hammer into this organization that the technicolor experts are for the purpose of guiding us technically on the [film] stock and not for the purpose of dominating the creative side of our pictures as to sets, costumes, or anything else.^[1]

Her association with Technicolor was severed in 1948 when she named the corporation as a co-defendant in an alimony suit against Herbert Kalmus, when it appeared he was about to remarry.

In the early 1950s she licensed her name for a line of designer television cabinets made by a California manufacturer. Ironically, the cabinets contained black and white sets.

Her personal papers are now in the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

[edit] References

^ Memo from David O. Selznick to production manager Ray Klune, March 13, 1939. Gone with the Wind was the fifth Technicolor picture Selznick made in three years.