Mr. Blackwell Dies, Age 86

Mr. Blackwell passed away yesterday afternoon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of complications from an intestinal infection. He was 86.

Some of his choices for worst dressed seemed meant to shock — notably, in 1973, Jacqueline Onassis, whose name regularly appeared on best dressed lists.

Blackwell’s goal was not to be insightful so much as controversial, Sheppard, the former Women’s Wear Daily fashion editor, said. As a result, she said, hardly anyone took his list seriously.

His personal style would make anyone wonder where he might rank on a best dressed list. In his early years he wore tight pants and silk shirts unbuttoned halfway down his chest. In middle-age he often wore a turtleneck sweater topped by a heavy gold chain. He spiced a dark conservative suit with bright red socks and wore a huge diamond earring.

In a 2000 interview with the Ottawa Citizen of Canada, he said he had had four face-lifts, starting with an ear-tuck and nose job at 17.

Born Richard Sylvan Selzer on Aug. 29, 1922, in Bensonhurst, a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., Blackwell was the younger of two sons of impoverished parents who were evicted from their apartment several times. More than once, Blackwell and his brother, Benson, lived in homes for troubled boys. Their father abandoned the family when Blackwell was a young teenager.

He got his start as an actor with small roles in several Broadway shows and was in the cast of “Dead End,” which starred the Dead End Kids.

When the show closed in 1937, Blackwell moved to Los Angeles with his mother and brother and found work in movies, starting with “Little Tough Guy” (1938), a spinoff of the Broadway show he left behind. He got another small role that year in “Juvenile Court,” starring Rita Hayworth.

In his 20s, he landed a small part in a Broadway show, “Catherine Was Great,” starring Mae West, in 1944.

He also worked as a model for “True Detective” magazine, posing as “a mad scientist, a crazed rapist, a killer priest and a blind fortune teller,” he wrote in his autobiography, to illustrate crime stories.

He credited aviation entrepreneur and movie producer Howard Hughes with changing his name to Richard Blackwell. Hughes cast him in “Vendetta” and chose the new name to sound “theatrical, polished, memorable,” Blackwell wrote in his autobiography. But his scenes ended up on the cutting room floor.

While “Vendetta” was in production in 1949, Blackwell met Robert Spencer, a hairdresser. They soon became business and life partners, forming a talent agency that specialized in female torch singers. To help one young client get started, Blackwell designed nightclub dresses for her. Encouraged by the positive reaction, he and Spencer closed their talent management business and launched the fashion company Mr. Blackwell.

In the early 1960s, the growing success of Blackwell’s worst-dressed lists pumped up sales of his own designs. The business survived the fashion upheaval of the 1960s, when miniskirts and minimal underwear put the Old Hollywood look Blackwell preferred out of date. As women’s dress styles continued to change in the 1970s, he wasn’t keeping up. First he said he was against jeans for women, then he came out with his own brand of them.

“It seemed he was desperately trying to hold on,” fashion expert Fox said. His fashion commentaries were also wearing thin by the ’70s and, Fox said, he became a caricature who was “no longer relevant.”

Blackwell closed his fashion business in the mid-1970s. He revived his acting career in the 1980s, appearing in several films and television series, usually playing “Mr. Blackwell” in cameo roles.

“No longer would I be Mr. Blackwell,” he wrote of the end of his fashion career. “I created him, and he had performed well. Audiences applauded. The world listened — and I did what I had to do.”

He is survived by Spencer, his partner of more almost 60 years. Private memorial services are being scheduled.