The Screengrab

One of the last living links to the silent film era, and one of that period's brightest stars, passed away in her Los Angeles home earlier this week at the age of 98.  In addition to being one of the silent era's most beautiful and popular stars, Anita Page was also one of its most fascinating stories, both for her meteoric rise to the top and her abrupt -- and self-driven -- decision to quit the business.

Born in Flushing in 1910, she left Queens to make it big in pictures when she was still a high school student, landing her first role (as an extra) at age 15.  Her big break came in 1928, when she co-starred with Joan Crawford in Our Dancing Daughters.  Although her character died at the end of the picture, audiences immediately took to her saucy grin, easy blonde good looks, and petite frame, and the movie -- as well as two sequel-cum-remakes, Our Modern Maidens and Our Blushing Brides (also starring Crawford) -- made her a huge star.  She became one of the biggest stars of the era, daily receiving hundreds of fan letters, including multiple proposals of marriage -- at least according to Page herself -- from Benito Mussolini.

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You may not know who Jack P. Pierce was, but if you've seen or even heard about the Famous Monsters of Filmland that made millions of dollars for Universal Studios in the 1930s, you know his work.  Pierce, a Greek immigrant who ended up in Hollywood more or less by accident, was the head of the makeup department at Universal Studios from 1928 until 1947, and crafted, on conjunction with stars like Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, some of the most memorable creatures in cinema history. In the days before CGI or even most photographic effects as we know them today, Pierce worked with theatrical equipment, padding, chemicals toxic by today's standards, and inventive use of costumes to create the visual hook of characters like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Ygor, Frankenstein,  the Wolf Man, and the Mummy.

When Universal merged with International after WWII, Pierce fell on ill fortune, and, after several decades working on television and for low-budget big-screen productions, he died in 1968, little-remembered outside of the people who had the good fortune to work with him.  Still, anyone who played such an integral part in defining one of Hollywood's most famous and fertile periods wasn't going to stay forgotten for long.  A DVD documentary about him was recently released focusing on his horror work; the motion picture industry's Makeup Artists and Hairstylists Union has named their lifetime acheivement award for him; and his hands, which crafted so many terrifyingly familiar faces, are featured on an American postage stamp, transforming Boris Karloff into Frankenstein's monster.

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Entertainment Weekly has your first look at Benicio del Toro in full makeup for his starring role as The Wolfman. We know what you’re thinking: Doesn’t del Toro already look like a wolfman? Why would he need any makeup? Just look at this still of Jack Nicholson in 1994’s Wolf; he looks like he just rolled out of bed and stumbled straight to the set. But apparently Rick Baker still needs to make a living, so despite the fact that he’s already been down this road with American Werewolf in London, the legendary makeup man is back at it. Hit the jump to see del Toro in all his furry glory.

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Ben Chapman has died, at the age of 79. The name probably means nothing to you, unless you were a member of his family or keep all your back issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland carefully sealed in protective Mylar bags. But for some of us, it's like hearing that the Blob died. Chapman played the title role in The Creature from the Black Lagoon back in 1954; more accurately, he played half the role, the half that took place above water. (The rest of the part was played, or rather swum, by Ricou Browning, who would later direct the underwater action sequences in the James Bond movie Thunderball and other aquatic potboilers.) The movie, which was directed by Jack Arnold (The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Mouse That Roared) and originally issued in 3-D, dealt with a team of scientists who are exploring what is supposed to be the Amazon and who encounter the titular creature, who mistakenly thinks that the heroine, played by Julia Adams, has been lured to his lagoon after seeing his picture at Match.com. It is sometimes called a classic, which is stretching things, but there's no question that a generation that was beginning to discover the classic Universal horror movie monsters on television and that was eager to have ghouls that it could call it own really took the frog-faced boy to their bosom. With his rubber-eggplant head and fixed expression, which gave it a passing resemblance to Lon Chaney, Sr.'s Phantom of the Opera, but with gills, he was an instant camp icon, one of the most endearingly pitiful monsters of his day.

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