THE film production designer and art director John Box became the man directors went to when they needed magic on an epic scale — like moving an entire country to the other side of the world.

Mark Robson called in Box when his latest project, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, seemed to have run aground. Ingrid Bergman was all set to go to China to make the film, a true wartime story in which the British missionary Gladys Aylward helped 100 Chinese children to escape the Japanese invaders. But shortly before the film-makers’ scheduled arrival, the Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang-Kai-shek objected to references in the script to “bound feet”, the practice of breaking and binding girls’ toes to give the distinctive, teetering walk Chinese men found attractive. Chiang wanted to project an image of his country as a modern 20th-century country.

Robson pointed out that it was a true story, set in the past, and refused to remove the references, and so it fell to Box, the film’s relatively untried art director, to find somewhere to double as China. He chose Wales.

“It was down to me — how the hell do you make this bloody movie,” Box said later. “There was a huge amount of money involved with Ingrid Bergman’s salary.”

In one of the most audacious chapters in film-location history, Box built a walled Chinese city at Nantmor in Snowdonia. “All the bombers going in and all the rest of it was all done in Wales . . . I just had a feeling that Wales and Chinese watercolours had an affinity.”

The move was so successful that Wales became a regular stand-in for Asia, in everything from Carry on Up the Khyber (1968) to Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003).

John Box built a reputation as a man who could work wonders on location, transforming the unlikeliest of places into somewhere on a different continent. He was perhaps British cinema’s most distinguished art director and production designer — the person responsible for the physical appearance of the world in which the drama unfolds.

Box worked regularly with the great British directors David Lean and Carol Reed and won no fewer than four Oscars — for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), Oliver! (1968) and Nicholas and Alexandra (1971). It is no surprise that he also won three British Academy Awards, though it reflects the richness of his career that they were for three entirely different films — A Man for All Seasons (1966), The Great Gatsby (1974) and Rollerball (1975).

His most notable films often had period settings, which were frequently lavish. His sets for Reed’s Oliver! however showed that he could bring lavish and imaginative design sense to Dickensian poverty. The film was shot in Shepperton Studios, though many thought the sets were real locations. Most of all, his designs were evocative — all those rags in Oliver!, all that snow in Zhivago, all that sand in Lawrence. His approach seemed to complement that of the famously perfectionist David Lean.

Initially he felt that the scene in Lawrence of Arabia when Omar Sharif makes his entrance as a distant figure riding across a hazy desert was bland. He ordered that the camel path to the well should be painted white and bordered with black pebbles to focus the viewer’s eye on Sharif.

Afterwards Lean told Box, “You’ll never do a better bit of designing in films — ever.”

Lean later wrote: “The painted path to the well and the black tongues of pebble pointing towards the approaching figure was a created pattern, a design, which was part of the drama. Not an affectation. No one noticed it, but I’m quite sure it helped contribute to the impact of the sequence.”

It became one of the most celebrated shots in cinema history.