Dick Smith

Dick Smith (1922-2014) was an Academy Award-winning makeup artist for the screen, considered one of the pioneers of the field particularly for special effects. In 1965, he wrote the first edition of his manual Dick Smith's Do-It-Yourself Monster Make-up Handbook.

Jim Henson first met with Dick Smith in 1973.^[1] Smith later consulted on The Dark Crystal. Wendy Froud described his contribution in a 1982 interview, when she recalled making the prototypge Gelfling heads:

“The first 'head' I had was a hard latex under-structure with a chamois leather skin over.. It looked interesting and was a nice texture but it didn't move enough. In the beginning we didn't know whether the creatures were going to be able to do anything, but I think it was Jim who heard of using latex foam and Dick Smith came in and worked with us for several weeks.”
—American Cinematographer. Dec. 12, 1982.

In 2004, Smith wrote the afterword to the book The Creatures of Farscape: Inside Jim Henson's Creature Shop. He concluded with this comment:

“Low budget and little prep are still SOP for TV series, but in spite of this, Farscape has taken advantage of every illusion special effects makeup can offer to bring to life worlds of outer space aliens in dazzling variety and beauty. It is because these makeups are so extraordinary that this art book has been published, so that they may be enjoyed for what they are: artistic creations.”

Smith began his professional career in early television in the 1940s at NBC, doing the standard make-up tasks and adjusting for the cameras, on series ranging from cooking programs to The Milton Berle Show. For early anthologies and televised plays, he made up José Ferrer as Cyrano de Bergerac and other stars. He began to show a specialty for character makeups, as in a 1955 Alice in Wonderland or for 1959's A Moon and Sixpence, making up Laurence Olivier as a leper. In the 1960s, his first film was the movie version of Requiem for a Heavyweight, while he handled science fiction for the first time on the TV series Way Out.

Smith became known for his believable aging make-ups (including for Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man, Marlon Brando in The Godfather, and F. Murray Abraham in Amadeus, winning an Oscar). He also lent realism to the effects for Linda Blair in The Exorcist and contributed to sci-fi and horror movies Scanners, Spasms, Altered States, The Hunger (making up vampire David Bowie), and the 1999 version of The House on Haunted Hill. Historical makeup jobs included many actors as Abraham Lincoln, Hal Holbrook for the TV version of Mark Twain Tonight, and Claire Bloom in the Robert Montgomery Presents TV play "Victoria Regina."

Sources

External links

• Official site