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History of Hollywood Make Up I
History of Hollywood Make up
You will almost certainly have been struck
by the way Hollywood actresses are made
up, and with good reason, because it certainly
makes them glow.
It all began when make up artists first
entered the scene many years ago. Initially,
cosmetics were scarce, and actors would
spend hours and hours before they were finally
made up. If you’d like to know what
the first make up brands were, and the top
makeup artists of the day, or Greta Garbo’s
make up tricks, among others, read this
article carefully as we retrace the history
of Hollywood make up.
The makeup artist’s craft began
to be increasingly recognised in the 1930s.
It’s important to note that makeup
artists were not highly considered from
the outset, because most of them were out-of-work
actors who took make up as a second option.
This becomes easier to understand if we
bear in mind that actors (be they theatre,
or early-movie actors) had to be able to
make themselves up.
Nevertheless, by the end of the silent
era, studios were beginning to hire people
to be specifically responsible for make
up, and this was the birth of the make up
artist. And characterisation was all the
more important in classic Hollywood where
little was known about make up (makeup artists
were hired for movies only from the ‘30s)
and where products were scarce. But the
early days of this new profession were no
bed of roses, far from it –and neither
was it so for those unfortunate actors who
had to bear the agony of spending four hours
sat in a barber’s seat -.
This is how ever more make up artists began
to appear, in the steps of the Westmores
and Max Factor. The pioneers were: Cecil
Holland, Lon Chaney and George Westmore.
Cecil Holland, whose name until quite recently
was utterly unknown, was not only known
in his day as “The father of the make
up profession”, but also was credited
with being the first “Man of a Thousand
faces”, and with having handed this
title over to Chaney. Two of his most outstanding
creations were the ones he produced for
Bull Montana in THE LOST WORLD (1925) and
for Boris Karloff in THE MASK OF FU MANCHU
(1932).
The Westmore dynasty were pioneers and
among the most important in Hollywood’s
make up scene during the silent era, when
George Westmore, a Jewish Cockney, set up
the first make up department in the history
of cinema, at the Selig Studios. Probably
some eighty percent of all movies made in
Hollywood in between 1930 and 1950, had
Westmore’s name among the credits.
Jack Dawn, for example, managed MGM’s
make up department for four years. His team
had good facilities, adjustable barber seats,
many mirrors and adequate illumination,
and demanded that it’s employees be
treated as artists, not technicians, despite
their craft being an extremely tough one.
William Tuttle started out as a Fox apprentice,
working under Dawn. Thus, he started out
sweeping and scrubbing floors, as Dawn was
a cleanliness freak. He typed, wrote reports,
ran errands and answered the telephone.
“I would prepare all his make up,
all the colours, and that’s how I
got familiar with what make up the actors
wore. There was no established system for
young people to learn the trade. You’d
enter it bit by bit. No apprenticeship period
was agreed on; you just began when they
thought you were competent”, Tuttle
remembers. One day Dawn looked at the sketches
that Tuttle had made for Fox, and that was
when he thought he would make a good makeup
artist. He began by letting him help out
on tests. One day, the person in charge
of make up on THE MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935)
didn’t show up, and they sent Tuttle
on as a substitute until they could hire
someone else. He himself ended up taking
charge of work n that picture. When Jack
Dawn moved to Metro in 1934, he took Tuttle
with him.
Jack Pierce and Maurice Seiderman were
two famous makeup artists who worked during
the ‘30s, and thanks to whom the movie
market was revolutionised. Both sttudied
human anatomy in an effort to make their
characterisations more realistic. Pierce
was behind Boris Karloff’s transformation
in Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi’s
in Drácula. Pierce continued to work
on characterisation in all the films made
around the Frankenstein story that followed
the first version, such as: THE BRIDE OF
FRANKENSTEIN (1935), SON OF FRANKENSTEIN
(1939), THE GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN (1942);
FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN (1943);
HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1945), etc. But he
also had the chance to show his creativity
by creating other monsters that have appeared
in the history of the terror-movie genre.
From the title character in THE MUMMY (1932),
to the one in WEREWOLF OF LONDON, etc. Seiderman,
for his part, was able to perfect the human
ageing process to such an extent that he
created 37 different “faces”
for Orson Welles in Citizen Kane. The actress
Jane Wyatt was frankly overwhelmed upon
entering Universal’s make up dept.
for the first time.
Now let’s go over actresses’
make up, decade by decade; what was being
worn, and the new products...
Other interesting articles on History of makeup
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