Eugenio Zanetti

Eugenio Zanetti was an Argentine dramatist, painter, film production designer, and theatre and opera director whose imagination shaped stages from Córdoba to Hollywood. Born in Córdoba on 19 October 1946, he travelled to Europe in the mid-1960s, crossed paths with Pier Paolo Pasolini, and worked on the filmmaker's Medea. After his father's death he returned home to support his family and threw himself into Argentine cinema, designing for Mario Sábato's The Power of Darkness (1979), which brought him a Moscow Film Festival design award, and Alejandro Doria's Los Pasajeros del jardín (1982).

During the Falklands/Malvinas War he relocated to Los Angeles and began a Hollywood career as production designer, starting with Wayne Wang's Slam Dance (1987). His credits multiplied through Flatliners, Soapdish, Last Action Hero and Tall Tale, culminating in Restoration (1995), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Art Direction. Three years later he earned another Oscar nomination for the visionary afterlife of What Dreams May Come. He also designed The Haunting, Alfonso Arau's Zapata, and Roland Joffé's There Be Dragons, while keeping a parallel life in theatre and opera: Verdi and Puccini productions across Europe and South America, and Thalia Awards in Argentina for directing They're Playing Our Song, Chicago and Dracula.

A painter as well as a designer, Zanetti showed work in Argentina, Mexico, the United States and Spain and received honorary doctorates and civic honours in Buenos Aires, Córdoba and Los Angeles. In 2010 Argentina's film critics gave him a special Silver Condor alongside other artists who had carried national cinema abroad. In 2014 he wrote and directed the fantasy drama Amapola, starring Camilla Belle, François Arnaud and Geraldine Chaplin. He spoke often of Sufi thought and of treating the Oscar as an industrial honour rather than a personal destination.

On 18 September 2026 he died suddenly at home in Buenos Aires, aged 79, after falling ill following rehearsals for Les Contes d'Hoffmann at the Teatro Colón. Days earlier he had been in Córdoba for a retrospective at the Museo Tamburini. Colleagues and the Asociación Argentina de Actores remembered an artist who never stopped working and whose neobaroque eye made fantasy feel architectural and alive.