Dick Smith, 92, spun Linda Blair's head

[Bob Of Burleson]

Dick Smith,
Oscar-Winning Makeup
Artist, Dies at 92

By WILLIAM YARDLEY
The New York Times

Dick Smith, who made flesh peel from famous actors’ faces, who made the young old and the beautiful hideous and who transformed a girl into a particularly possessed tween — all while working as one of film and television’s most original and accomplished makeup artists, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 92.

His death was confirmed in a Twitter message by his friend Rick Baker, an Academy Award-winning makeup artist who was once his assistant.

Before computers claimed so much of the simulated gore and metamorphosis depicted in modern moviemaking, Mr. Smith did his work with plaster life masks, liquid foam latex and painstaking perfectionism.

He traced his career to a particular day in the early 1940s when, as a freshman at Yale on his way to becoming a dentist, he stumbled on a book in the Co-Op that he could not stop reading. Not the most literary of Ivy League texts, it was titled “Paint, Powder and Makeup.”

Inspired, he began tinkering with some of the materials described in the book and soon found himself more inclined to mangle mock teeth than repair real ones. He ended up working out of a low-tech lab in the basement of his home in Larchmont, N.Y. He became a craftsman and a conjurer, and not the kind of makeup artist known for making people prettier.

Those growling jowls of Marlon Brando in “The Godfather” movies? Mr. Smith applied them.

The brooding F. Murray Abraham in “Amadeus”? Mr. Smith helped turn Mr. Abraham’s Antonio Salieri, the composer and rival of the upstart young Mozart, into a hoary relic as an embittered, and somewhat mad, old man.

David Bowie aging before your eyes in “The Hunger”? Mr. Smith’s were the hands of time.

And little Linda Blair, who played the 12-year-old possessed by evil in “The Exorcist”? Mr. Smith made her head spin and spew green vomit and filled her mouth with decaying teeth. He made her pupils all but erupt from her eyeballs. Years later, he still had the fiberglass version of her head, the one that swiveled 360 degrees.

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