William Tuttle, 95; his makeup created classic film characters
WASHINGTON -- William J. Tuttle, who as head of the makeup department at
No cause of death was reported.
Mr. Tuttle's career encompassed more than 300 films, as well as the transition from black and white to Technicolor, a development he called murder, because the intense light needed for the process could melt layers of makeup. As a young man, he worked on the early Technicolor classic "The Wizard of Oz" (1939) with Judy Garland.
He was MGM's makeup chief from 1950 to 1970. For his work on "7 Faces of Dr. Lao" (1964), starring Tony Randall as a cunning Chinese medicine show impresario with many identities, he was the first in his profession to win an Academy Award. An Oscar category recognizing makeup skill did not begin on a regular basis until 1981.
After leaving MGM, he became a freelance makeup artist, working on such features as Mel Brooks's "Young Frankenstein" (1974).
By then, he had become known as King of the Duplicators for his way of making a wax facial mask of practically everyone at the studio. Once he had the impression of a face, he would easily develop character makeup that transformed, for example, Hurd Hatfield from a handsome young man into an aging degenerate in "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1945).
Mr. Tuttle spent 15 years as assistant to the head of MGM's makeup department during the heyday of the studio system. Plucking, dabbing, swabbing, he fiddled with the faces of MGM's biggest stars, including Katharine Hepburn, Greer Garson, Jeanette MacDonald, June Allyson, and Donna Reed, to whom he was briefly married in the early 1940s.
Reed said at the time: "The first day I went to the studio, they sent me to the makeup department, and a makeup man named Bill Tuttle looked me over. He shook his head, mumbled something about what will they dig up next, and then went to work on me. He changed my eyebrows, shaded my chin, and made my mouth bigger. He made me very mad.
"Then he looked at me again and said: 'Now you'll do. Except you should change something else.' When I asked him what, he said, 'Your name. It should be Mrs. William Tuttle.' "
While head of MGM's makeup staff, Mr. Tuttle worked on films across many genres, including "Julius Caesar" (1953), "The Teahouse of the August Moon" (1956), and "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1962), with Marlon Brando as, respectively, the Roman leader, Asian servant, and 18th-century British seaman.
There was also "Jailhouse Rock" (1957) with Elvis Presley; "North by Northwest" (1959) with Cary Grant; and the all-star Western "How the West Was Won" (1962).
For the popular 1960 movie version of H.G. Wells's "The Time Machine," Mr. Tuttle's trip to the monkey house at the San Diego Zoo provided inspiration for creating the fur of the underground-dwelling Morlocks. He also put tiny light bulbs in facial masks to create the spooky electric-eye effect.
"7 Faces of Dr. Lao," directed by George Pal, was Mr. Tuttle's tour de force of makeup artistry. According to an account in "The Films of George Pal," by Gail Morgan Hickman, Mr. Tuttle made watercolors of the seven characters inhabited by Randall and a plaster cast of Randall's head. The cast became the mold from which he created the heads of the distinctive characters.
"He then went to work on me," Randall said in the book. "He shaved my head and eyebrows. Socially, it was a disaster. The effect gave me an unborn look. But professionally it was a masterstroke. All of my preconceived notions on how I would play the characters vanished.
"As soon as Tuttle applied his makeup magic, I felt myself actually become these strange people," Randall said.
