Noted production designer, Barbara Ling, passed away at 73.
She won an Oscar for Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.
She died after a battle with cancer.
Barbara Ling, Oscar-winning Once Upon A Time In Hollywood Production Designer, Dead At 73
Ling's career spanned four decades.
Summary
Barbara Ling, the production desiger who landed an Oscar for Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, has died at 73. Ling died Thursday in Santa Barbara after a battle with cancer. She's survived by her wife, Lindsay, and their sons, Clay and Will.
In a career that leaped across four decades, Ling served as the production designer on two 1991 gem, Oliver Stone’s The Doors and Jon Avnet’s Fried Green Tomatoes, on which she also was an associate producer. She also teamed with director Scott Hicks on Hearts in Atlantis (2001), No Reservations (2007), The Lucky One (2012) and Fallen (2016).
Barbara Ling's Notable Projects
Most recently, she worked on Marc Forster’s A Man Called Otto (2022), starring Tom Hanks, and on the blockbuster biopic Michael (2026), directed by Antoine Fuqua. On Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), Ling shared the Oscar for best production design with set decorator Nancy Haigh. The two had previously worked together on the 1988 film Checking Out.
Tarantino’s “main thing from the moment we sat down was, ‘I want this to be real. I want to see. I want to smell and I feel that Hollywood. I don’t want to do green screen over here or have the digital interpretation. Let’s really change the billboards, and let’s put the real facades back on,’” Ling underlined in a 2019 interview.
“The night of the first shoot when all the neon lit up and the period cars came out and [Arianne Phillips’] costumes were out there, you absolutely believed you were in 1969 because everything was real. It was a movie filming a real street. We pretty much carried that theme through Westwood [to re-create the Bruin Theater] and everywhere we shot", she added. Ling designed more than 150 sets in transforming 2019 Los Angeles into its 1969 counterpart, all without the aid of extensive CGI. On Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, she was working against construction and demolition as she sought to transform Hollywood 2018 into Hollywood 1969.
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