Obit of the Day: “The Godfather of Makeup”

Dick Smith was heading toward a career in dentistry until he picked up a copy of Paint, Powder, and Makeup at the Yale University bookstore. It changed his life forever.

For nearly sixty years, Mr. Smith became the pre-eminent makeup artist in television and film. Although the accolades don’t reflect his influence (only one Oscar and one other nomination), the techniques he developed became industry standards and he influenced an entire generation of makeup designers.

After a brief foray into film in the 1940s, Mr. Smith established himself while working at WNBC-TV in New York City. It was while there that he started experimenting with foam latex and layering which produced a much more realistic look than the traditional one-piece latex masks. The difference was obivous, even to actors. Sir Laurence Olivier, who was transformed into a leprosy victim by Mr. Smith, looked at himself in the dressing room mirror and said, “Dick, it does the acting for me.”

In 1967, he earned an Emmy for his makeup work on Mark Twain Tonight! which made Hal Holbrook into a near-perfect doppleganger of the famed American author.

The move to Hollywood began in full in 1970 when he designed the makeup for Little Big Man which protrayed Dustin Hoffman as a 121-year old man. Two years later he a created a more subtle aging process for the then-48-year-old Marlon Brando, who played Don Corleone in The Godfather. In 1973, he turned Linda Blair into a demon-possessed, green-eyed, face-torn monster.

But Mr. Smith earned not a single Academy Award nomination for this work. FInally in 1984 he shared an Academy Award with his protege Rick Baker (who would win seven Oscars), for their work on that year’s Best Picture, Amadeus. Again Mr. Smith created an astounding age illusion for Best Supporting Actor winner F. Murray Abraham. He earned his only other nomination in 1989 for his work on Dad starring Jack Lemmon.

In 2011, Mr. Smith was honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with a Governor’s Award for his contribution to the field. Mr. Baker called him the “greatest makeup artist of all time.”

Dick Smith died on July 30, 2014 at the age of 92.

Sources: NY Times, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and IMDB.com

(Images: Dick Smith and Marlon Brando on the set of The Godfather, 1972, courtesy of empireonline.com; Dick Smith applying makeup to Linda Blair for The Exorcist, 1973, courtesy of dicksmithmake-up.com; Dick Smith applying makeup to F. Murray Abraham for the film Amadeus, 1984, courtesy of prosthetictransfermaterials.com)

Also relevant on Obit of the Day:

Stuart Freeborn - Designed Yoda

Jane Royle - Makeup artist on the 1st three Harry Potter films

89-year-old Charlotte Despard speaks to an anti-fascist rally, Trafalgar Square, London, June 1933.

Charlotte Despard seems like she was a really cool lady. She was an anti-capitalist advocate for animal liberation, direct action, and Irish independence. She and Maude Gonne (an Irish nationalist) worked together to create the Women’s Prisoner’s Defence League, which helped support political prisoners such as Irish republicans. Despard was politically active well into her nineties (she died when she was ninety-five), and spoke at several anti-fascist rallies, like the one in the picture.

Zitkala-Ša, also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was the most amazing woman you’ve never heard of.

A writer, editor, musician, teacher and political activist, she was born on February 22, 1876 on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Her mother was Sioux and her father, who abandoned the family when she was very young, was European-American.

When she was eight, missionaries came to the res and took Zitkala-Ša along with several other children to the White’s Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana, one of many such institutions where Native children were forced to assimilate into white American culture. She studied piano and violin and eventually took the place of her teacher when she resigned. When she received her diploma in 1895, she delivered a speech on women’s rights.

She earned a scholarship to Earlham College, where she continued to study music. From 1897-99, she played with the New England Conservatory in Boston and played at the Paris Exposition in 1900. She collaborated with composer William F. Hanson on the world’s first Native American opera, based entirely on Sioux melodies that had previously existed only as oral tradition. She would play the melodies and Hanson transcribed them. The Sun Dance Opera debuted in 1913 to warm reviews, but I can find no recordings of it, and it seems it’s never performed.

Zitkala-Ša also wrote a number of collections of Native American stories and legends. She wrote them in Latin when she was at school and then translated them into English. She was the first Native person to do so in her own words, without a white editor or translator. In addition, she wrote extensively about her schooling and how it left her torn between her Sioux heritage and her assimilation into white culture. Her writings were published in The Atlantic Monthly and in Harper’s and she served as editor for the American Indian Magazine.

Unsurprisingly, most of her writings were political. She was a fierce yet charismatic advocate for Native American rights. Her efforts helped pass the Indian Citizenship Act and the Indian Reorganization Act. Having founded the National Coalition of American Indians, she spent the rest of her life fighting to protect our many indigenous communities from exploitation.

Her accomplishments were incredible- but have you ever heard of her? I had never heard of her either. Just another example of a history-changing woman omitted from the history books.

THERE IS ALCOHOL, FREE LUNCH, DOGS, AND FUDGE. WHERE IS THIS FUTURE??

I'm on board! Looks like it could be my next fave joint.

Sarla Thakral was first Indian woman to fly. Born in 1914, she earned an aviation pilot license in 1936 at the age of 21. After obtaining the initial license, she completed one thousand hours of flying. While she was working towards a commercial pilot license, World War II broke out and civil training was suspended. Later, her husband, the first Indian to earn an airmail pilot’s license, died in a crash. She abandoned her plans to become a commercial pilot and joined the Mayo School of Art in Lahore, where she trained in the Bengal school of painting and obtained a diploma in fine arts. (Wiki)

Inuit children at boarding school. The sign on the wall behind them reads, “Please do not speak Eskimo.” (1914)

This reminds me of how whole sects of complex Inuktitut dialects were wiped out by Euro settlers. There were hundreds of different and diverse dialects in Canadian Inuktitut languages alone, and a chunk of that was wiped out during early 20th century. That language is already on the brink of collapse (only 35,000 or so now loosely speak it).

They also took away not just their language, but their surnames, and replaced them with ID-numbers. As if taking their children and capturing them into residential schools (where they were systematically gaslighted, sexually abused and experimented on the regular) wasn’t enough, an Inuit child’s name was legit changed to something like “Annie E7-121.”

Komako Kimura, a prominent Japanese suffragist, at the women’s right to vote march on Fifth Avenue in New York City. October 23, 1917

bluephoenix52:

knowhomo:

I only met one other homosexual in the army. That was in Le Havre in 1917. We was on the boat coming home. I don’t know how these things work, whether it’s through conversation, or whether it’s the attitude of the individual concerned, but we seemed to come together, see. All of a sudden his arm was round my neck and this, that and the other, and then, of course, one thing led to another. And that was Phil, my affair that I had for seven years. When I come out of the army we stuck together. I was living at the time in Ilford. I rejoined the army in 1920, then I went out to Germany. I was living with Phil at the time and I saw him when I came home on leave and we kept a flat together. I was in the army because the army was my life at that period. He was somebody just like a wife to come home to…

… I don’t think our friends or family knew, yet they had a very good suspicion. Phil and I often talked about it, only he said, well, he says, as long as we love each other, what’s it to do with other people? And that was the true situation.

Text: First person account as told by Gerald, born 1892, Norfolk, England.  Excerpted from Between the Acts: Lives of Homosexual Men 1885-1967, Jeffrey Weeks and Kevin Porter (eds)

(story found thanks to: www.woolfandwilde.com)

“As long as we love each other, what’s it to do with other people?” 

Lady Florence Norman, a suffragette, on her motor-scooter in 1916, travelling to work at offices in London where she was a supervisor. The scooter was a birthday present from her husband, the journalist and Liberal politician Sir Henry Norman.

Hetalia was far from the first cute anthropomorphising of nations…here we have gallant little Britan protecting poor vulnerable France from a plump cheeked and adorable Germany.

Don’t know where to begin with this one…I can’t get past France as a clingy, weeping little girl being protected by a little Tommy. I can just imagine how delighted the French were at way they were personified here…suspect this one was not exactly for a Gaulish audience. It was sent in 1914, but by one of my friend’s Norwegian ancestors so I can’t make out the message on the back, which is a pity.

Little Sarah Rector, a former slave, became one of the richest little girls in America in 1914. Rector had been born among the Creek Indians, as a descendant of slaves. As a result of an earlier land treaty from the government. Back in 1887, the government awarded the Creek minors children 160 acres of land, which passed to Rector after her parents’ deaths. Though her land was thought to be useless, oil was discovered in its depths in 1913, when she was just 10 years old.

Her wealth caused immediate alarm and all efforts were made to put the child Sarah under “guardianship" of whites whose lives became comfortable immediately.  Meanwhile Sarah still lived in humble surroundings. As white businessmen took control of her estate, efforts were also made to put her under control of officials at Tuskegee Institute.

Much attention was given to Sarah in the press.  In 1913, there was an effort to have her declared white, so that because of her millions she could ride in a first class car on the trains. 

file that under black history they could be teaching us in February

Jabot

1900

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

“Featured is an excellent example of women’s wear inspired by menswear, which began in the 1890s and continued to grow in popularity. The more feminine jabot is replaced with a masculine four-in-hand tie. Also, the choice of fabrics alludes to men’s formalwear vests.”

Evening dress, 1900-01

From the Digitalt Museum

I.... don't want to like this as much as I do...

Happy Birthday, Jules Verne! image of Verne surrounded by his prophetic creations from Science and Invention Vol. VIII, No. 4, Aug. 1920 cover and illustrations from the 1874 English translation of De la terre à la lune (From the Earth to the Moon Direct in Ninety-seven Hours and Twenty Minutes, and a Trip around it. Trans. by Louis Mercier and Eleanor King)

Typhoid Mary

Mary Mallon [foreground above] was born in Northern Ireland in 1869 but emigrated to the USA in ‘84. She worked as a cook in New York, where, within two weeks of her first employment, the residents developed typhoid fever. After this, each family for whom Mary worked invariably became ill with typhoid. Wherever Mary went outbreaks followed her. When one family she worked for rented a house in Oyster Bay for the summer, six of the eleven people in the house came down with typhoid, a disease said by local doctors to be “unusual” at that time.

Typhoid researcher George Soper was hired to investigate. He published his results saying he believed soft clams might be the source of the outbreak and that:

No one knew her whereabouts but eventually Soper traced her to an active outbreak in a Park Avenue penthouse. When Soper approached Mallon she adamantly rejected his request for urine and stool samples.

The New York City Health Department sent Dr. Sara Josephine Baker to talk to Mary but still she refused to cooperate, believing she was being persecuted because she was an immigrant. A few days later, Baker arrived at Mary’s workplace with several police officers who took her into custody. Cultures of Mary’s urine and stools, taken forcibly with the help of prison matrons, revealed that her gallbladder was teeming with typhoid salmonella. She refused to have her gallbladder extracted or to give up her occupation as cook, maintaining stubbornly that she did not carry any disease. 

She was held in isolation for three years until, in 1910, she agreed that she “[was] prepared to change her occupation, and would give assurance by affidavit that she would upon her release take such hygienic precautions as would protect those with whom she came in contact”. Upon release, Mallon was given a job as a laundress, which paid lower wages, so she changed her name to Mary Brown and returned to her previous occupation as a cook. For the next five years, she went through a series of kitchens, spreading illness and death, keeping one step ahead of Soper.

In 1915, a serious epidemic of typhoid erupted among the staff of a hospital, with twenty five cases and two deaths. City health authorities investigated, learning that a portly Irish-American woman had suddenly disappeared from the kitchen help. The police tracked her to an estate on Long Island. Mary spent the rest of her life in quarantine until, aged 69, she died of pneumonia.

January 14, 1943: The Casablanca Conference begins.

Codenamed “SYMBOL”, this Allied conference was conducted in a hotel in Casablanca two months after the British-American invasion of French North Africa. Originally intended to be the first meeting of the war between the “Big Three” (Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin), the conference ended up settling with the Big Two plus the French - Churchill, Roosevelt, and Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud were the only leaders in attendance; the Russian leader was, reportedly, too occupied with his own nation’s ongoing efforts to drive out German forces. Notably, in attending the conference, Franklin Roosevelt became the first sitting American president to visit Africa and the first to leave the country during wartime. Among the issues discussed was a plan to invade the “soft underbelly of the Axis” - Italy, which would open up another front on continental Europe and hopefully relieve pressure off the Soviets. Another product of the conference was the Casablanca directive, plans for the bombing of strategic targets in Germany to be launched from Britain. 

But by far the single most significant product of this conference was the Casablanca Declaration, which announced to the world that the Allies would accept nothing less from the Axis powers than unconditional surrender, a phrase Roosevelt had lifted from the American Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant. He assured that although this policy would ideally mean the end of the Axis threat forever, it was not aimed at the people of each respective nation but rather “the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people”.

Churchill and Stalin both disapproved of the policy, and it ended up serving as motivation for the Axis powers, now presented with two options by the Allies (total, crushing defeat and victory) to fight even harder. The Allied policy of “unconditional surrender” may have even prolonged the war in this way, and also because it was a useful propaganda tool in Axis countries. Late in the war, the Japanese made this statement, probably representative of many Axis attitudes toward unconditional surrender, to Soviet officials:

Constructing the Star Theatre, New York City, 1901

Note: The original film reel in fact showed the building being destroyed, but audiences at the time preferred to see it played backwards, and so do I.