Nina Lawson, 82; her big hair topped Met's opera stars

Jim Wilson/The New York Times/FileNina Lawson, who ran the wig department at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, styled Roberta Peters in 1983. (Jim Wilson/The New York Times/File)

NEW YORK - On the opera stage, barrel-chested bassos and sylphlike sopranos have one thing in common: big hair. Up top, just above the source of the ringing notes, sits a lacquered, powdered, teased, or pouffed wig, styled within an inch of its life and holding on for dear life as turbulent events unfold.

For more than 30 years, Nina Lawson ran the wig department at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, tending the elaborate hairpieces and egos of legendary singers including Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi. Her confections never toppled.

Ms. Lawson died Sept. 9 in Ayr, Scotland. She was 82. The cause was pernicious anemia, said Beth Bergman, a friend.

From 1956 until her retirement in 1987, Ms. Lawson fabricated or groomed the hairpieces worn by the great and not so great of the opera world, from the lowliest member of the Met's chorus to headliners such as Birgit Nilsson, Luciano Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland, and the young Placido Domingo.

"She had an incredible ability to make the most wonderful wigs without spending a lot of money," said Joseph Volpe, the former general manager of the Met. "She watched every dollar, while keeping the artistic vision foremost in mind."

She also ministered to some of the most temperamental artists of the day. In addition to shaping, trimming, and cleaning a collection of more than a thousand wigs and hairpieces, she smoothed the ruffled feathers of high-strung performers ready to throw a fit if a wig threatened to chafe, and she defused standoffs between designers and stars.

Ms. Lawson grew up on a farm near Forth in Lanarkshire, Scotland, where she enjoyed putting a stylish curl in the tails of her father's prize Ayrshire cattle. "I'd braid them at night, then comb them out in the morning for shows," she told The New York Times in 1959. "The tails looked ever so nice and ripply."

At Stowe Hairdressing College in Glasgow, she started on live hair and worked her way up to wigs and period hairpieces.

"I was really quite thorough," she told Opera News. "I learned periods for hair styles of different European countries and how to make wigs of all kinds."

After completing her training, she became the hairdresser for the Carl Rosa Opera Company and later worked on opera and ballet productions at Sadler's Wells Theater in London.

While at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario under Tyrone Guthrie, she came to the attention of Rudolf Bing, who hired her in 1956.

Ms. Lawson almost immediately began reorganizing the Met's wig department, which had used rented wigs for decades. She quickly built up an inventory of 1,400 and then fitted, trimmed, cut and adjusted them to various faces and head sizes. (Today the Met has more than 5,000 wigs.)

Working with just one assistant in her early years at the Met, Ms. Lawson groomed the wigs for seven or more operas a week. In the 1958 season, that meant preparing and dressing 750 wigs.