Tony Award-winning costume designer Franne Lee died Aug. 17 following a short illness, NPR has confirmed. Lee, who was 81, was best known for her work on “Saturday Night Live,” where she costumed iconic characters including the Coneheads, the Killer Bees and the Blues Brothers.

“Doing sets and wardrobe for a show like ‘SNL’ is a gauntlet,” Laraine Newman, one of the show’s former cast members, told NPR.

Lee worked on “SNL” from the show’s premiere in 1975 until 1980. She frequently hunted for items from thrift shops like Goodwill. “She was always looking for the deal,” said Lee’s daughter, Stacy Sandler.

One of Lee’s final interviews took place last year when she appeared on the podcast “Ian Talks Comedy.”

In a nearly hour-long episode, Lee revealed that while she wasn’t always a fan of the show’s humor, she greatly enjoyed working with stars like Newman and Gilda Radner. “I didn’t like a lot of the writing to be honest with you,” Lee said. “I thought some of it was good but I thought it was very sophomoric.”

During her tenure at “SNL,” Lee also created costumes for operas and Broadway musicals helmed by legendary director Hal Prince. Lee won her first two Tony awards for a 1974 production of “Candide” and scored another in 1980 for Prince’s rendition of “Sweeney Todd.”

For the latter musical, Lee found inspiration in vintage cartoons from Punch, a now-defunct British satire magazine.

“I think that’s kind of actually representative of Franne’s work, that she tends to take something that’s sort of silly and comic and bring a kind of seriousness to it,” said Doug Reside, curator of the Billy Rose Theatre Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The performing arts archive houses many of Lee’s papers from the 1970s through the 1990s.