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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