Star Wars Ship Designer Colin Cantwell Dies At 90

Colin Cantwell, the concept artist who designed iconic Star Wars ships including the X-Wing Starfighter, TIE Fighter, and Death Star, has died. Sierra Dall, Cantwell's partner of 24 years, confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that he died in his Colorado home at age 90.

When Cantwell was 85 in 2017, he "came out" to his local Boulder neighborhood as having a strong sci-fi legacy and contributing strongly to the Star Wars canon. According to a profile in The Denver Post, Dall said she had been living with Cantwell for more than 15 years by that point and had no idea Cantwell had such an impact on contemporary pop culture and sci-fi. It wasn't until 2014, when a landlord decided to renovate, that Cantwell asked for Dall's help packing up the basement--"packed floor-to-ceiling with drawings, slides, models, scripts, computer monitors, and bags of handmade clothes"--that Dall realized.

As the article goes on to elaborate, Cantwell "never talked about his life as he quietly worked in computer engineering in Colorado Springs, Fort Collins, and elsewhere."

In addition to Star Wars, Cantwell's credits include photographic effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), technical dialogue for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and computer graphics design consultant for WarGames (1983).

Cantwell's website, which is far more open about his work than he apparently was offline, also notes that before working in Hollywood, he worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA during the historic '60s space race between the US and Russia. Cantwell created educational programs for the public to better understand space flights. Cantwell later was a resource to broadcaster Walter Cronkite during the live coverage of the moon landing in 1969.

He also wrote two sci-fi novels, CoreFires 1 and CoreFires 2.

Although his work on Star Wars is a huge accomplishment in itself, his 2016 Reddit AMA is worth diving into to further appreciate his impressive career. For example, Cantwell tells a story about working with Stanley Kubrick and "persuaded him not to start the movie with a 20-minute conference table discussion," proceeding to explain how Cantwell pitched him instead on the dramatic space opening that followed the film's iconic "dawn of man" beginning.

Image credit: Getty Images/Jerod Harris