VouLee Giokaris, a Hollywood costumer whose 50-year career included work on such handsome film classics as The King and I, The Sound of Music and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? died Aug. 21 at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif. She was 92.
Known professionally as simply VouLee (a nickname that riffed off her given Greek name, Stavroula), she began her career working in the Paramount wardrobe department under legendary eight-time Oscar winner Edith Head.
VouLee's first big break came in 1956 as an assistant woman’s costumer with Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments, and that led to a full woman’s costuming assignment that year on the Walter Lang musical The King and I, starring Yul Brenner and Deborah Kerr.
For the Julie Andrews musical The Sound of Music (1965), directed by Robert Wise, VouLee spent months in Austria with the cast on location. She appeared in a installment of The Oprah Winfrey Show in October that reunited the film's cast and crew after 45 years.
Giokaris worked with the likes of Ronald Reagan, Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball, Bob Hope and Johnny Cash, to name just a few. According to her nephew, Emmy-winning editor Nicholas Eliopoulos, Giokaris dated Burt Reynolds shortly after he broke up with Dinah Shore.
VouLee also did costumes or wardrobe on such films as Otto Preminger 1959 pair Porgy and Bess and Anatomy of a Murder, Michael Curtiz's The Comancheros (1961), Robert Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Billy Wilder's Irma La Douce (1963), Tom Gries' The Hawaiians (1970) and John Schlesinger's Marathon Man (1976).
VouLee also had a prolific career in television, with stints on The Lone Ranger, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Gunsmoke, Have Gun — Will Travel, The Partridge Family, Death Valley Days, The Wild Wild West, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Police Story, Laverne & Shirley, Happy Days and The Addams Family.
VouLee, who moved with her two sisters from Kansas City, Mo., to Hollywood in 1942, also was an accomplished artist who produced hundreds of fine oil paintings, and she belonged to several art guilds in the Palm Springs area. She lived in North Hollywood for six decades before retiring to the desert.
In addition to Eliopoulos, survivors include her sister, Angela Giokaris Alexander. In lieu of flowers, the family requests a contribution be made in Giokaris' name to the Motion Picture and Television Fund – Resident Support Division.
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