OGRE OF THE MAKE-UP BOX

Happy New Year, everyone! Welcome to a new page in the chronicle of the life and career of Jack P. Pierce, makeup artist extraordinaire. Let's dive in, shall we?

The clipping shown above is from The New York Times, Sunday March 31, 1935. It includes the article, "Ogre of the Make-Up Box", written about two months after Werewolf of London began shooting. The author also includes info on The Bride of Frankenstein that had just been completed.

“The Frankenstein of Universal City has just finished his biggest job to date and is well advanced on his next assignment of turning men into monsters. This practitioner of occult arts, before whom strong actors tremble is Jack Pierce, half man, half plasterer. After making two monsters a day (male and female created he them) over a stretch of thirty-two days for ‘The Bride of Frankenstein’ which James Whale has just finished, he is now filling the hair-restorative companies with consternation by growing hair on the palm of Henry Hull for the ‘Werewolf of London’. He is now on location at Vasquez Rocks, California, a weird desert tract of jagged cliffs which look like geological formations on Mars.

“Pierce is the centre [sic] of attention for all the players and staff. A wry, irascible-looking chap, with black mustache and steel-rimmed spectacles, he looks precisely like a German scientist. Especially is this so, when, attired in his white surgeon’s tunic [actually a barber’s smock; Pierce was a professionally-trained barber] worn over a sweater, he is busy doing unprecedented things to the visage of homo [sic] sapiens.”

PICTURE PLAY REVIEWS 1935

While not completely absent from the press, notoriety for Jack Pierce was not as abundant when compared to influential cosmetic giant Max Factor and the sheer numbers of the Westmore clan. Reviewers were also more likely to comment on the actors, director and cinematography of a film rather than the makeup artist. The paucity of screen credits for Pierce may have contributed to this, but Hollywood was, after all, all about the players.

In these reviews from Picture Play magazine's August 1935 issue. writer Norbert Lusk mentions the camera work during Henry Hull's transformation into the Werewolf of London, but does not name the person who applied the makeup (Pierce). He comes closer, but attributes a more substantial contribution (and rightly so) from Karloff in the Bride of Frankenstein, when he writes, "Boris Karloff leaves nothing undone in making The Monster a memorable masterpiece of make-up and curiously affecting acting."

Even though he had already been head of Universal's makeup department for some years, Jack Pierce's work went uncredited in both films. One wonders what the proud artist may have thought.