It was from the early 1940s to the mid-1980s that the artist and designer Olga Lehmann, who has died aged 89, achieved her greatest recognition. As a costume designer she was nominated four times for American TV's Emmy awards, for The Man in the Iron Mask (1976), The Four Feathers (1977), A Tale of Two Cities (1980) and, in 1984, for The Master of Ballantrae. Her costumes also featured in films like The Scapegoat (1959), The Guns of Navarone (1961) The Victors (1963) and Kidnapped (1971).
She was born in Chile, the eldest of three children of a French father - the director of a copper mine - and his Scots wife. Olga's idyllic early childhood was spent in a village an hour by horse-drawn carriage from Santiago, but as a precocious 16-year-old she was enrolled as a scholarship student at London's Slade School of Fine Art.
The Slade was then ruled over by the formidable professor Henry Tonks and later by professor Randolph Schwabe - who was responsible for her first professional commission, painting the scenery for Rossini's comic opera La Cenerentola, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham at Covent Garden. She graduated in 1934 with a clutch of prizes and plunged into the bohemian world of Fitzrovia, setting herself up in the Hogarth Studios in Charlotte Street.
Lehmann became a book and magazine illustrator, worked at landscape painting and portraiture, was commissioned to design commemorative stamps, painted Covent Garden scenery and was contracted by a paint manufacturer to create murals in hotels, restaurants and shops. Her mural work was represented at major exhibitions, including Mural And Decorative Painting (Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1935) and Mural Painting In Great Britain (Tate Gallery, 1939).
During the second world war, her lively, decorative murals enlivened the dour interiors of the nationwide chain of state-run "British restaurants", requisitioned hotels, the ministry of aircraft production and the government censorship department in Holborn. Her illustrative work, meanwhile, was particularly appealing to editors craving a note of light-hearted fantasy amid wartime austerity.
Her many illustrations for the Radio Times, between 1941 and 1961, conveyed the essence of the programmes with a minimum of line and a sharp incisiveness of execution, and her ideas came to fruition during convivial sessions in the pubs around Broadcasting House. Her view was that having an amusing time was the prerequisite of an artist's life.
Lehmann had entered the world of films at London's Gainsborough Studios, where she did mural painting for Hi Gang! (1941), the film version of the Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon radio series. By 1957 she was designing the ballet scenes for the Vera-Ellen musical Let's Be Happy, and that year she became a fully-fledged costume designer on the Australian "western" Robbery Under Arms, with Peter Finch.
In television she was to establish her forte with a flamboyant style of costumes for the swashbuckling adventure classics which had become an American network staple. Her son, Paul, became a Hollywood writer and producer, and she was thrilled in 1986 to be invited to paint portraits of characters on his TV series, Dynasty II: The Colbys Of California, which were to be hung on the walls of the mythical family's mansion. Her difficulty with Barbara Stanwyck was to make her look 20 years younger than her actual 80 years, while her task with Charlton Heston was to dissuade him from posing with a shotgun in his lap.
In 1939, Lehmann married Carl Huson, broadcaster, editor and publicity director for Argo records, and went to live in the Essex countryside. After his death in 1984, she moved to a charmingly converted artisan's cottage in Saffron Walden. Her youthful vivacity never left her, and her diminutive prettiness, vivid red lipstick and red painted fingernails retained the authentic note of the bohemian London of her youth. Her last one-woman show was held in Yoxford, Suffolk, last summer, exactly 44 years after her first show in New Burlington Street, London. Her son survives her.
· Louise Olga Mary Lehmann, artist and designer, born February 10 1912; died October 28 2001
