For his work in movies, he won an Academy Award for Best Production Design, for All That Jazz (1979), and nominations for Mary Poppins (1964), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), and The Wiz (1978).
He spent two years of mandatory military training with the Royal Air Force,[6] as a trainee pilot in Ontario, Canada.
He was not allowed to make any reference to the famous illustrations that Mary Shephard had done for the original book in 1934, as the rights to the story did not include this.
He also alluded to Mary Poppins' "secret life", by making her clothes grey or black on the outside, but with brightly coloured linings and flashes of crimson.
Walton received further Academy Award nominations for his work on Murder on the Orient Express (1974), and The Wiz (1978).
He won his only Academy Award for his work as an Art Director on Bob Fosse's musical film All That Jazz (1979).
[2] In 1983, Diana Ross, the star of the film The Wiz, chose Walton to design the stage set for her 1983 Central Park concert, "For One & For All".
Broadcast worldwide on the Showtime cable network, the concert special, over the course of two days, featured an on-site audience of over 1,200,000 on the park's Great Lawn.
In 1989, the American Museum of the Moving Image showcased over 30 years of his work for films, television, and theatre in an exhibit entitled: Tony Walton: Designing for Stage and Screen, including drawings, models and photographs from his early plays including the Regency-style Conversation Piece from 1957 and "his evocation of a London street" for the 1964 film Mary Poppins.
[7] In December 2005, for their annual birthday celebration to 'The Master', The Noël Coward Society invited Walton as the guest celebrity to lay flowers in front of Coward's statue at New York's Gershwin Theatre, thereby commemorating the 106th birthday of Sir Noël.
[9] Walton said that he fell in love with Andrews when they were children and he saw her playing the egg in a theatre production of Humpty Dumpty.