TC ECKSTEIN CAFE SPOTLIGHT CELEBRITY: Ruth Carter is a Hollywood costume designer who grew up in Springfield MA

TC ECKSTEIN CAFE TV NEXT SPOTLIGHT CELEBRITY:

Ruth Carter is a Hollywood costume designer who grew up in Springfield. Her career spans a long list of major motion pictures, and she is best known for her work on Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" and Steven Spielberg's "Amistad," receiving Academy Award nominations for both films. Carter's most recent work can be seen in "Selma," a film about the trio of marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965.

"I first started as an intern in the costume shop at StageWest and did everything from crafts to sewing and working backstage," said Carter, about her time at Springfield's best-known playhouse now called City Stage.

While she learned to sew on her mother's old sewing machine, that wasn't the thing that propelled her into costume design. Carter recalled the times when she and her two brothers, Robert and Roy, would draw together. Those occasions, filled with paper, pencils and sibling sociability, began her love for the arts.

After she graduated from Springfield's Technical High School, she went on to study at Hampton University and interned at the Santa Fe Opera before moving to Los Angeles in 1986. She met director Spike Lee while working at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. He School Daze," and they have worked together ever since.  "Spike Lee has a very specific vision. You either love Spike Lee movies or you don't. I've seen both sides," said Carter. "I like the mainstream movies, but it's nice to work with someone who is going to be a little more quirky and ask for you to do something a little more unusual, to ask for something a little over the top and different. That doesn't come around a lot."

hired her to work on his second film, "

Carter's costume design process starts with mood boards, which help her to tell the visual story of the people in the film. The goal is to be as accurate and realistic as possible, especially with period pieces.

"Everything doesn't come out of the fashion pages of a magazine or online," said Carter. "Some things might come out of a library or we might really have to dig to get some photos of some real life people doing some of the things in the movie."

Carter's hard work paid off when she was nominated for her first Oscar in costume design in 1993 for her work on Spike Lee's "Malcolm X." Her second nomination came in 1998 for her work on Steven Spielberg's "Amistad."