Headline: A peak behind the Hollywood mask by one of its foremost makeup artistsIn 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.