On the first night of filming Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the neon signs Barbara Ling had spent months rebuilding along Hollywood Boulevard flicked on, period cars rolled into place, and a street reconstructed almost entirely from scratch briefly became 1969 again. "You absolutely believed you were in 1969 because everything was real," Ling said of that night. Ling, the Oscar-winning production designer behind that recreation and dozens of other films across four decades, died on July 9, 2026, in Santa Barbara, California, at 73.

Born in Los Angeles in August 1952, Ling grew up in the city she would later spend a career reimagining onscreen. Before Hollywood, she designed sets and lighting for more than 200 theater, opera and musical productions, work that gave her an unusual entry point into film: her first professional credit was as lighting designer on the 1981 HBO special The Pee-Wee Herman Show, taped at the Roxy in West Hollywood, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Her move into production design came in 1986, when musician and director David Byrne hired her to design his feature debut, True Stories. Work followed quickly: Heaven and Less Than Zero in 1987, then Checking Out in 1988, an early credit alongside set decorator Nancy Haigh, the colleague with whom she would later share an Oscar. She designed Oliver Stone's The Doors and Jon Avnet's Fried Green Tomatoes, both released in 1991, serving as associate producer on the latter as well. Two years later she turned her eye on her hometown for the present-day Los Angeles of Falling Down, then designed With Honors in 1994, before director Joel Schumacher brought her onto Batman Forever in 1995 and Batman & Robin in 1997, where she rebuilt Gotham City as a neon fantasy far removed from the period realism of her earlier work.

That range, moving between grounded period detail and full stylistic invention, carried into the next two decades. She designed Sydney Pollack's Random Hearts in 1999, then began a long-running collaboration with director Scott Hicks, designing Hearts in Atlantis in 2001, No Reservations in 2007, The Lucky One in 2012 and Fallen in 2016, steady work that ran alongside the occasional larger studio picture.

Nothing tested that range like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Tarantino had told her from the outset that he wanted no green screens and no digital fixes: a Hollywood Boulevard real enough to walk down and believe. Recreating the old Pussycat Theatre marquee alone required her team to work with structural engineers, making sure the facade could go back up without damaging the buildings behind it. Of the scale of what they built, Ling said in a 2019 interview, "It's a lot. When people see it the first time, you're totally bedazzled." Backstage after winning her Academy Award for the film in 2020, she reflected on what that effort had meant: "L.A. is not a preservation city, never has been. ... What we did will be impossible to do next year," she said, adding that she hoped the recreation might slow the pace of demolition in the city where she grew up.

At the 92nd Academy Awards, the prize for Best Production Design was Ling's first Oscar nomination and her first win, shared with Haigh, for whom it was a second statuette after Bugsy. Onstage, Ling kept her remarks brief: "Thank you to the Academy. Thank you and we share this with our incredible art department and my partner in crime, decorator Nancy Haigh, and mostly to Quentin Tarantino for writing an epic masterpiece and letting us take this wild ride with him," she said, according to Art Departmental. The film also brought her an Art Directors Guild Award, a Critics' Choice Award, and nominations from BAFTA and the Satellite Awards.

Ling kept working after the Oscar. She returned to contemporary, character-driven design for Marc Forster's A Man Called Otto, starring Tom Hanks, in 2022, then designed Antoine Fuqua's Michael Jackson biopic Michael. It reached theaters in April 2026, her final credit, less than three months before she died.

She is survived by her wife, Lindsay, and their sons, Clay and Will. In a statement, her family described her as "equally gifted at period authenticity, contemporary realism, and stylized fantasy," according to TheWrap.

What Ling built rarely outlasted the productions that needed it. The Pussycat marquee she rebuilt for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood came down again once filming wrapped, and the 1969 Hollywood Boulevard she recreated existed for only a handful of shooting nights before the crews moved on. What persists is on film: The Doors, Fried Green Tomatoes, two Batman pictures, four collaborations with Scott Hicks, and the meticulously rebuilt street that finally won her an Oscar after four decades spent constructing other people's worlds.