Dick Smith, Oscar-Winning Makeup Artist, Dies at 92 (Published 2014)

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.