B6 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, MAY 26 , 2022
obituariesBY ADAM BERNSTEINJune Hansen, an English-born
actress who enlivened dozens of
Washington-area theatrical pro-
ductions with her barbed deliv-
ery and mischievous presence,
died April 28 at her home in
Boise, Idaho. She was 95.
The cause was pneumonia,
said a son, Jim Hansen.
After performing with British
repertory companies in the
1940 s and early ’50s, Mrs. Han -
sen was in South Africa playing
the lead in a touring production
of George Bernard Shaw’s “Saint
Joan” when she met her future
husband, Orville Hansen, an
American traveling on a fellow-
ship. She accompanied him to his
native Idaho, where she raised
seven children while he prac-
ticed law and rose as a Republi-
can in the state legislature.
They settled in the Washing-
ton area in 1969, after he was
elected to the first of three terms
in Congress, and she soon re-
newed her theater career. Work-
ing frequently at Arena Stage and
the Washington Stage Guild,
Mrs. Hansen spent three decades
playing all manner of British
roles, from Henry Higgins’s
housekeeper in Shaw’s “Pygmal-
ion” to the grandmotherly eccen-
tric medium Madame Arcati in
Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit.”
Joe Brown, in his 1989 Wash-
ington Post review of the Coward
comedy at the Washington Stage
Guild, noted her ability to “dither
adorably” in such roles.
But Mrs. Hansen showcased a
broader range as the frumpish
proprietor of an English seaside
boardinghouse in Harold
Pinter’s “The Birthday Party” at
the Studio Theatre in 1986. She
twice played the tenacious Win-
nie, the half-buried heroine of
Samuel Beckett’s existential play
“Happy Days,” in stagings by the
Washington Stage Guild and the
Scena Theatre. As a caustic bu-
reaucrat from a preservation
trust, she also won plaudits in
Peter Shaffer’s “Lettice and
Lovage” at the Folger Eliza-
bethan Theatre in 1993.
She was nominated seven
times for the Helen Hayes Award,
a Washington theater award for
excellence, before winning in
2000 for her supporting per-
formance in Tom Stoppard’s “In-
dian Ink” at the Studio Theatre.
She played an acerbic widow
who comments on her vivacious
late sister’s active love life: “She
used them like batteries. When
things went flat, she’d put in anew one.”
Washington Post theater critic
Lloyd Rose found Mrs. Hansen
“simply delicious, hitting her
consonants with a resounding
whack that knocks the lines over
the fence.”
June Duncan was born in
Southport, north of Liverpool, on
June 29, 1926. Her father was a
chartered accountant, and her
mother had been a nurse before
marrying.
She spent her Washington
years in the suburb of Arlington,
Va., where she was among the
first female lay readers of St.
Andrew’s Episcopal Church and
helped start a church theatergroup. She moved back to Idaho
in 2014.
Her husband died in 2017. In
addition to her son, of Boise,
survivors include six other chil-
dren, Margaret Hansen of Mid-
dleton, Idaho; Elizabeth Stripe of
Vienna, Va.; Katherine Hansen of
McCall, Idaho; John Hansen of
Boise; Mary Szymanski of Glen
Allen, Va.; and Sara Yun of Gil-
berts, Ill.; 12 grandchildren; and
a great-granddaughter.
As she reflected on a career
that would last from age 16 until
her retirement at 79, she once
told The Post: “My father thought
I would grow out of it, but I
didn’t, actually.”JUNE HANSEN, 95
Award-winning actress graced the stage in dozens of D.C. productions
SCOTT SUCHMAN/STUDIO THEATRE
Holly Twyford, left, and Mrs. Hansen star in Studio Theatre’s “Black Milk” in 2004. Mrs. Hansen, an
English-born actress, spent three decades playing all sorts of British roles.CHRISTOPHER O. BANKS/INTERACT THEATRE COMPANY
Actress June Hansen plays a fairy in “Star-Spangled Christmas at
the Old Bull and Bush” by Interact Theatre Company in 2001.BY HARRISON SMITHColin Cantwell, a concept art-
ist, animator and computer engi-
neer who helped bring the Star
Wars universe to life, designing
and building prototypes for a fleet
of epic spacecraft — from the
menacing TIE fighter to the el-
egant, dart-shaped X-wing — and
giving the Death Star its alien look
and fatal flaw (a trench), died May
21 at his home in Colorado
Springs. He was 90.
The cause was dementia, said
Sierra Dall, his partner of 24 years
and only immediate survivor.
A veteran of NASA’s Jet Propul-
sion Laboratory, where he created
educational programs to teach
the public about early space
launches, Mr. Cantwell went on to
work with directors including
Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spiel-
berg, developing miniatures,
computer graphics and other vis-
ual effects for movies including
“2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968)
and “Buck Rogers in the 25th
Century” (1979).
But he was best known for his
work on George Lucas’s “Star
Wars” (1977), when he created the
first designs for many of the mov-
ie’s most memorable ships, help-
ing to define the look of the block-
buster franchise even though he
worked on only its first install-
ment. “He was a fairly quiet, very
nice and extremely talented man,”
said Craig Miller, a former direc-
tor of fan relations for Lucasfilm.
In a statement, Lucas said that
“Colin’s imagination and creativi-
ty were apparent from the get-go,”
adding, “His artistry helped me
build out the visual foundation
for so many ships that are instant-
ly recognizable today. His talent
was and remains evident for all to
see.”
When the filmmaker hired Mr.
Cantwell in late 1974, Lucas was
still negotiating financing with
Twentieth Century Fox, working
out concepts like the Force and
overhauling a screenplay that was
tentatively titled “Adventures of
the Starkiller, Ep. 1: The Star
Wars.” The script mentioned a
number of spacecraft, but offered
only vague descriptions of what
they looked like and how they
moved.
Mr. Cantwell was tasked with
filling in the details, instructed by
Lucas to make the ships look real-
istic but with “a comic book nobil-
ity,” according to Brian Jay Jones’s
book “George Lucas: A Life.” He
exchanged drawings with the di-
rector before landing on final
sketches that he used to make his
models, assembling plastic minia-
tures from thousands of pieces —
including pill containers, lamp
pieces, and parts of commercial
model kits for planes, cars and
boats — that he stored in a set of
eight-foot-tall drawers.
Whether the spacecraft were
shown individually or en masse,
zipping across the screen in for-
mation or chasing one another in
a dogfight, Mr. Cantwell wanted
them to be immediately recogniz-
able, and to generate a sense of
nervousness or excitement de-
pending on their place in Lucas’s
science fiction saga. “My premise
was you had to instantly know the
bad guys from the good guys ... by
how [a ship] looks and feels,” he
said in a 2014 interview for the
website Original Prop Blog.
His design for the X-wing, the
Rebel Alliance’s signature star-
fighter, was inspired by seeing a
dart thrown at an English pub and
was meant to suggest the image of
a cowboy drawing his guns out-
side a saloon. His sleek initial
model for the Millennium Falcon,
on the other hand, was meant to
evoke a lizard that was poised to
strike — and was used instead as
the basis for the rebel blockaderunner that appears in the film’s
opening scene. (Other artists, in-
cluding Joe Johnston and Ralph
McQuarrie, ultimately contribut-
ed to the Millennium Falcon’s
worn-down, hamburger-shaped
look.)
Mr. Cantwell also created pro-
totypes for the imperial star de-stroyer, the wedge-shaped ship
that fills the screen in the film’s
opening moments (to determine
its size, he asked Lucas whether
the ship was supposed to be “big-
ger than Burbank”; the answer
was yes), and created the Death
Star, the laser-equipped space sta-
tion capable of destroying entire
planets.
The film’s climax featured an
attack run across the Death Star’s
equator, in which Luke Skywalker
(Mark Hamill) flies through a can-
yonlike trench to fire torpedoes atthe space station’s one weak
point. As Mr. Cantwell told it, the
scene originated by chance, after
he had almost finished making
the Death Star model from a plas-
tic sphere measuring about 14
inches across.
The sphere came in two halves,
which he transformed into theDeath Star by scratching features
into its surface, but the halves
shrank at the middle where they
were supposed to meet. “It would
have taken a week of work just to
fill and sand and refill this depres-
sion,” he said in an interview with
the Montecito Journal of Califor-
nia. “So, to save me the labor, I
went to George and suggested a
trench, with armaments project-
ing from the sides of the trench
resulting in battles with starships
flying in and out of the trench.
Lucas agreed, and it became a keypoint in the film.”
Colin James Cantwell was born
in San Francisco on April 3, 1932.
His father was a commercial art-
ist, and his mother worked as a
riveter during World War II to
support the military effort. One of
his uncles was Robert Cantwell, a
journalist for Time and Sports
Illustrated who wrote a pair of
well-received novels.
As a boy, Mr. Cantwell was
bedridden with tuberculosis and
a partially detached retina. “The
cure was to confine me to a dark
room with a heavy vest across my
chest to prevent coughing fits,” he
recalled in a 2016 “Ask Me Any-
thing” interview on Reddit. “I
spent nearly TWO YEARS of my
childhood immobilized in this
dark room. Suffice to say, nothing
else could slow me down after
that!”
Mr. Cantwell studied at the
University of California at Los
Angeles, where he made student
films and received a bachelor’s
degree in applied arts in 1957.
During the 1969 moon landing,
he served as the conduit between
CBS broadcaster Walter Cronkite
and NASA, listening to the com-munications line between Apollo
11 astronauts and Mission Control
so that he could update Cronkite
on the space capsule’s progress.
By then, he had started making
scientific and commercial films
and was using his technical exper-
tise for big-budget pictures. Trav-
eling to London, he helped Ku-
brick shoot space scenes for
“2001” and befriended the direc-
tor; years later, he recalled visit-
ing Kubrick’s home one night and,
while dining on turkey sandwich-
es, suggesting the film’s dramatic
opening scene, a celestial image of
the sun, moon and Earth scored to
Richard Strauss’s “Also sprach
Zarathustra,” which became the
movie’s main theme.
Mr. Cantwell later wrote and
directed “Voyage to the Outer
Planets,” a large-screen trip
through the solar system that ran
at what is now the Fleet Science
Center in San Diego, and contrib-
uted technical dialogue for “Close
Encounters of the Third Kind”
(1977).
He also worked as a computer
graphics consultant for Hewlett-
Packard, helping to develop one of
the first color display systems for
a desktop computer. Mr. Cantwell
used the system to create graphics
for the Cold War techno-thriller
“WarGames” (1983), in which a
dozen giant computer screens
flash with the positions of Soviet
nuclear missiles.
Mr. Cantwell later conducted
quantum physics research, ac-
cording to his partner, Dall, in
addition to writing a two-volume
science-fiction epic called “Core-
Fires.” He rarely spoke about his
“Star Wars” work until he was in
his mid-80s, when he began ap-
pearing at fan conventions and
selling prints of his concept art,
after decades when far more fans
seemed to know the work of col-
laborators such as McQuarrie.
Interviewed by the Denver
Post, he said he felt that Lucas had
underplayed his role in the crea-
tion of “Star Wars” because Mr.
Cantwell had declined an offer to
run the director’s special-effects
shop, Industrial Light & Magic.
He was far less interested in con-
tinuing his effects work, he said,
than in pursuing new avenues of
invention.
“Colin told me one time that
this is the way he went through
life, that he liked to create things
that people couldn’t unthink,”
Dall told the Denver Post. “That’s
how he got into a lot of things: He
would come up with such origi-
nal, creative and intelligent ideas
that people would look at it, and
then they couldn’t go back.”COLIN CANTWELL, 90
Engineer designed Death Star, other spacecraft key to Star Wars universe
JEROD HARRIS/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES
Colin Cantwell, seen in 2014, suggested to George Lucas that the Death Star have a trench, after his model from a plastic sphere came in
two halves, which shrank at the middle where they were supposed to meet. The Death Star’s trench became a key plot point.“You had to instantly know the bad guys from thegood guys ... by how [a ship] looks and feels.”
Colin Cantwell