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Summary
Summary
Headline: A peak behind the Hollywood mask by one of its foremost makeup artists In Hollywood's heyday, almost every major studio had a Westmore heading up the makeup department. Since 1917, there has never been a time when Westmores weren't shaping the visages of stardom. For their century-long dedication to the art of makeup, the Westmores were honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2008. In this lively memoir, Michael Westmore not only regales us with tales of Hollywood's golden age, but also from his own career where he notably transformed Sylvester Stallone into Rocky Balboa and Robert DiNiro into Jake LaMotta, among many other makeup miracles. Westmore's talent as a makeup artist first became apparent when he created impenetrable disguises for Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, and Frank Sinatra for the 1963 film The List of Adrian Messenger. He later went on to become the preferred makeup man for Bobby Darin and Elizabeth Taylor, and worked on such movies and TV shows as The Munsters, Rosemary's Baby, Eleanor and Franklin, New York, New York, 2010: A Space Odyssey, and Mask, for which he won an academy award. The next phase of his career was to create hundreds of alien characters for over 600 episodes of Star Trek in all its iterations, from The Next Generation to Enterprise. Replete with anecdotes about Hollywood and its stars, from Bette Davis's preference for being made-up in the nude to Shelley Winters's habit of nipping from a "little bottle" while on the set, Makeup Man will satisfy any Hollywood's fan's appetite for gossip or a behind-the-scenes look at how tinsel town's most iconic film characters were created. Academy Award-winning Michael Westmore has been making up the stars for over fifty years. He frequently appears on the SyFy channel show Face Off with his daughter McKenzie Westmore.
Author Notes
Jake Page was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 24, 1936. He received a bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1958 and a master's degree from the Graduate Institute of Book Publishing at New York University in 1960.
He worked for Doubleday as an editor of Anchor Books. In 1962, he was put in charge of Natural History Press, which also gave him responsibility for Natural History magazine. He eventually took the job of science content editor for Smithsonian magazine. He also wrote a monthly science column for the magazine entitled Phenomena, Comment and Notes. His columns for Smithsonian and Science were collected in Pastorale: A Natural History of Sorts and Songs to Birds.
He wrote dozens of books on the wonders of science including earthquakes, dinosaurs, arctic exploration, zoos, and the languages of cats and dogs. He then turned his attention to the Indians of the American Southwest. He retired from Smithsonian magazine in the late 1970s to help photographer Susanne Anderson on a book documenting the Hopi tribe. Hopi was published in 1982 and followed by Navajo in 1995.
His other books include Lords of the Air: The Smithsonian Book of Birds written with Eugene S. Morton, The Big One: The Earthquake That Rocked Early America and Helped Create a Science written with Charles B. Officer, The First Americans: In Pursuit of Archaeology's Greatest Mystery written with J. M. Adovasio, In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American Indians, and Uprising: The Pueblo Indians and the First American War for Religious Freedom. He also wrote five mystery novels including The Stolen Gods and The Lethal Partner. He died from vascular disease on February 10, 2016 at the age of 80.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Readers will want to take a giant step back in time with Academy Award-winner Westmore's amiable and intimate look at his family, a Hollywood makeup dynasty for four generations, and the stars they've been making look good since 1917. His own career began in 1961 with a Universal Studios apprenticeship, all the time being "watched like a hawk" by family elders. Readers of a certain age will lap up stories about Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee's budding romance, Desi Arnaz's (emergency) horsehair mustache, and Ernest Borgnine's doomed marriage to Ethel Merman. As the book progresses, younger readers will recognize more names and productions, including Harrison Ford in Blade Runner and Sylvester Stallone (whose fight scene injuries Westmore created) in Rocky. Westmore dishes occasionally but usually has a nice word to say about his clients. He even shares Elizabeth Taylor's chili recipe. Later sections concentrate on Westmore's decades-long association with the Star Trek series. Tighter editing might have eliminated the book's "Snippets," a miscellaneous closing collection of reminiscences, but most of them are just as entertaining as the book proper. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Chronicling Westmore's life and career as one of Hollywood's most renowned makeup artists, this book will have cinephiles and film historians on the edge of their seats. From the foreword by Patrick Stewart to the book's final pages, which include photographs of Indian actor Kamal Haasan, this volume is burgeoning with one anecdote, juicy tidbit, and entertaining story after another of behind-the-scenes Hollywood through the ages. Hailing from a makeup and special-effects dynasty dating back to the 1900s, Westmore tells, with coauthor Page, of his family's impact on the motion-picture industry in the preface and explains how it has earned them the name the Royal Family of Makeup Artists. In the pages that follow, it becomes clear why the moniker is well deserved. Westmore's grandfather George is credited with no less than establishing the makeup industry in Hollywood, while Westmore's career includes iconic projects like Blade Runner, Raging Bull, and TV's The Munsters. For anyone who loves an insider's peek into the golden age of Hollywood and beyond, this book will deliver.--Mattalia, Glendy X. Copyright 2017 Booklist
Table of Contents
| Foreword | p. vii |
| Preface | p. x |
| Tributes | p. xiii |
| Acknowledgments | p. xiv |
| Walk of Fame | p. 1 |
| The Family | p. 3 |
| The Sixties | p. 26 |
| The Seventies | p. 60 |
| The Eighties | p. 107 |
| Star Trek: The Next Generation and the Nineties | p. 203 |
| Star Trek: Deep Space Nine | p. 236 |
| Star Trek: Voyager | p. 251 |
| Star Trek: Enterprise | p. 255 |
| Snippets | p. 266 |
| Awards, Honors, and Nominations | p. 291 |
| Photo Credits: Studios, Photographers, and Artists | p. 293 |
| Index | p. 295 |
| About the Author | p. 305 |