Eugenio Zanetti, Oscar-winning production designer of 'Restoration,' dies at 79

Eugenio Zanetti, the Argentine-born production designer who won the Academy Award for art direction in 1996 for "Restoration" and went on to shape the look of major Hollywood films including "What Dreams May Come" and "Last Action Hero," died on September 18 in Buenos Aires. He was 79.

Zanetti fell ill and died suddenly after a day of rehearsals at the Teatro Colón, the city's storied opera house, where he had been preparing his own staging of Offenbach's "Les Contes d'Hoffmann" ("Los cuentos de Hoffmann") for the venue's 2026 season, according to relatives cited by Argentine outlets including La Nación and Infobae. Accounts differ slightly on whether he collapsed at the theater and died in hospital or fell ill after returning home; no formal cause of death has been released.

A career that bridged Buenos Aires and Hollywood

Born on October 19, 1946, in Córdoba, Argentina, Zanetti studied architecture briefly before turning to design. He crossed paths with the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini in Europe in the mid-1960s and worked on his 1969 film "Medea," an early credit that pointed him toward a life split between stage and screen.

He built his reputation in Argentine cinema and theater through the late 1970s and early 1980s, winning a Moscow Film Festival design award for Mario Sábato's "El poder de las tinieblas," before relocating to Los Angeles. His American film career began with Wayne Wang's "Slam Dance" in 1987 and expanded through "Flatliners" (1990), "Soapdish" (1991) and "Last Action Hero" (1993).

The high point came at the 68th Academy Awards, held March 25, 1996, when Zanetti won the Oscar for art direction on Michael Hoffman's "Restoration," a 17th-century period drama starring Robert Downey Jr. The win is recorded in the Academy's own ceremony archive. Accepting the award from Emma Thompson, he told the audience, in a speech preserved in the Academy's official acceptance-speech database:

"Restoration is a story of a man who finally is restored by God after he follows his heart. I did follow my heart, until here, and I'm grateful to God. I'm also grateful to my mentor, to my mom who's here. To the Academy, to Miramax and to everybody who make possible Restoration. My only advice is follow your heart."

He received a second Oscar nomination in 1999 for "What Dreams May Come," the Robin Williams afterlife drama known for its painterly visual style, and later worked on "The Haunting" (1999) and "There Be Dragons" (2011), among other titles.

The numbers

• 1 competitive Academy Award, for "Restoration" (1996), plus a second nomination in 1999
• 40-plus theater and opera productions directed or designed across Europe and South America
• Honorary citizen of three cities: Buenos Aires, Córdoba and Los Angeles
• 79 years old at the time of his death

A parallel life in theater and opera

Alongside his film work, Zanetti built an extensive career in live performance, designing and directing productions of Verdi's "Un ballo in maschera" and "Nabucco" and Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" and "Tosca." He won Argentina's Thalia Award, the country's equivalent of the Tony, for staging musicals including "Chicago" and "Dracula," and in 2010 received a Special Silver Condor from Argentine film critics alongside composer Gustavo Santaolalla and director Juan José Campanella. He held honorary doctorates from the Universidad de las Artes and the Universidad de Palermo, and in 2019 the Argentine Senate awarded him its Domingo Faustino Sarmiento Mention of Honour.

His staging of "Les Contes d'Hoffmann" for the Teatro Colón was a revival of a production that had first triumphed there in 2019, and it was scheduled to close out the opera house's 2026 lyric season. He had traveled to his native Córdoba only days earlier for a retrospective of his paintings at the city's Tamburini museum, an event associates said had left him energized about both that show and the opera then in rehearsal.

Profiles of Zanetti traced that dual career to a consistent visual philosophy. He credited Sufi mysticism and the writings of Idries Shah, which he said he first encountered as a teenager, with shaping his artistic outlook for roughly five decades, and Argentine press described his signature style as a neobaroque sensibility built on luminous figures emerging from otherwise dark, opaque backgrounds. That approach ran through both his Hollywood production design and the dozens of paintings he exhibited in Argentina and abroad, including a retrospective at Córdoba's Tamburini museum that opened only days before his death, and it informed the visual world of "Les Contes d'Hoffmann," the production he had returned to Buenos Aires to revive.

Reaction

Argentine cultural outlets moved quickly to mark his death, with tributes from figures in the country's film and theater communities emphasizing both his Hollywood breakthrough and his decades of largely uncelebrated stage work at home. Coverage in Perfil and The Rio Times described him as a rare Argentine artist who moved fluidly between Hollywood soundstages and Buenos Aires's grandest opera stage, a dual career few of his contemporaries matched. Colleagues quoted in Argentine press said he had continued designing and directing into his final days, with associates noting "he didn't stop working" even as his health declined.

What happens next

The Teatro Colón has not yet said publicly whether Zanetti's staging of "Les Contes d'Hoffmann" will proceed as planned or how the production will credit its late designer; the opera was slated to close the venue's 2026 season. Retrospectives of his design work, including the recently opened exhibition of his paintings in Córdoba, are expected to continue as previously scheduled. Funeral and memorial arrangements in Buenos Aires had not been announced as of Saturday.