Dick Smith – who made flesh peel from famous actors’ faces, who made the young old and the beautiful hideous and who transformed a girl into a possessed tween – all while working as one of film and television’s most original and accomplished makeup artists, died on July 30. He was 92.
Before computers claimed so much of the simulated gore and metamorphosis depicted in modern movie making, Mr. Smith did his work with plaster life masks, liquid foam latex and painstaking perfectionism.
He traced his career to a day in the early 1940s when, as a freshman at Yale University on his way to becoming a dentist, he stumbled on a book in the student co-op that he could not stop reading. Not the most literary of Ivy League texts, it was titled Paint, Powder and Makeup.
Inspired, he began tinkering with some of the materials described in the book and soon found himself more inclined to mangle mock teeth than repair real ones. He ended up working out of a low-tech lab in the basement of his home in Larchmont, N.Y. He became a craftsman and a conjurer, and not the kind of makeup artist known for making people prettier.
Those growling jowls of Marlon Brando in The Godfather movies? Mr. Smith applied them.
The brooding F. Murray Abraham in Amadeus? Mr. Smith helped turn Abraham’s Antonio Salieri, the composer and rival of the upstart young Mozart, into a hoary relic as an embittered, and somewhat mad, old man.
And little Linda Blair, who played the 12-year-old possessed by evil in The Exorcist? He made her head spin and spew green vomit and filled her mouth with decaying teeth. He made her pupils all but erupt from her eyeballs. Years later, he still had the fibreglass version of her head, the one that swivelled 360 degrees.
Mr. Smith and his former assistant Rick Baker won an Oscar for their work on 1984’s Amadeus, and in 2011 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave Mr. Smith an honorary award for his “unparalleled mastery of texture, shade, form and illusion.”
“It’s kind of godlike to see your artistry come to life in this form,” he told The New York Times in 1983. “It is thrilling to me that you can take a human being [and] can create on his face another person or creature who has all the life of a totally different individual.”
Richard Emerson Smith was born in Larchmont, N.Y., on June 26, 1922, the son of Richard and Coral Smith. His mother had dental problems when he was a boy, and he often accompanied her to the dentist. “I loved all of the dentist’s tools,” he said. “I loved watching him use his hands.”
Years later, after his discovery of Paint, Powder and Makeup, he began experimenting with transforming himself into “the classic monsters” – mummies, werewolves, the Phantom of the Opera, Mr. Hyde. After graduating from Yale, he served in the U.S. Army in the Second World War and then went looking for a job as a makeup artist.
He found work at New York’s WNBC-TV, where he was head of the makeup department for 14 years, much of it under producer David Susskind.
While working in television, Mr. Smith began developing new ways of shaping foam latex and attaching it to faces to make his creations more lifelike. Among the actors whose faces he altered: Anthony Quinn, Audrey Hepburn and Laurence Olivier. He transformed Hal Holbrook into Mark Twain.
Mr. Smith often made life masks of actors, then built prosthetics that would fit perfectly onto their faces.
“While everyone else was making masks from a single mould, Dick made these multiple pieces and layered them on the face,” Mr. Baker, a long-time friend, told the Washington Post in 2007. “Today, that’s the way everyone does it.”
Mr. Smith’s extensive film work also included adding decades to Dustin Hoffman in 1970’s Little Big Man and making David Bowie age before your eyes in the 1983 horror flick, The Hunger.
“Even when the characters were fantastically weird, I always tried to make them believable,” Mr. Smith told the Post. “Actors have to feel like they are the person they are portraying. I think my work has helped many to achieve that.”
He leaves his sons, Douglas and David.
