SANTA BARBARA, July 11 -- no green screen, everything real. Ling took him seriously. She changed the Sunset Strip billboards. She sourced period-accurate storefronts. She turned a studio picture into something that looked less like a production design job and more like a recovered archive.

Ling died Thursday, July 10, 2026, in Santa Barbara, California, after a battle with cancer. She was 73.

Her Academy Award for Best Production Design - shared with set decorator Nancy Haigh and presented at the 92nd Academy Awards in February 2020 - capped a career that began not in film but on stage. Before Ling arrived in Hollywood, she had designed more than 200 theater, opera, and musical productions. That training gave her a spatial intelligence ...