To know what a hair and make-up designer can do for a film, have a look at the scenes depicting the court docket of Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love (1998), ideally on an enormous cinema display, in order that the heads and faces in close-up or medium shot – as in a 3rd of just about all movies’ footage – loom over six metres excessive. Gwyneth Paltrow has a pale fashionable glow achieved seemingly with out cosmetics, and up to date unfastened locks managed by quasi-Renaissance plaits. Judi Dench’s high-foreheaded Queen seems as if lacquered with Liz’s authentic white-lead and egg-white. The forehead curls and moustaches of Joseph Fiennes and Colin Firth come direct from Sixteenth-century miniatures. And there are rows of court docket women, excellent frights with faces appropriately blanched and raddled, surmounted with puffed, pearl-studded, false-hair “tires” – many intelligent variants of interval dos.
Lisa Westcott, who has died aged 76, created that Elizabethan/up to date screenful. She was Oscar-nominated for the work, and in addition for her Victorian headscape of clean, centre-parted girls’s hair and males’s wild whiskers in Mrs Brown (1997). She lastly received an Oscar, shared with Julie Dartnell, for Les Misérables (2012), during which Victor Hugo’s characters visibly age and sicken on a display swarming with the poor and soiled underclass – a whole lot of extras to grubby up and dishevel for the barricades.
Nearly all of the leads needed to be remodeled day by day from very wholesome display stars into the bodily wretched, with straggle extensions to their beards, and prosthetic “slips” to make their flawless enamel look rotten or, for Anne Hathaway, lately pulled out. When Taylor Swift auditioned, unsuccessfully, to play the road derelict Éponine within the film, Westcott stained her enamel brown, grimed her pores and skin, dark-circled her eyes: Swift regarded, as Westcott had designed her to, like demise.
Westcott attributed her versatility and unflappability to her thorough preliminary coaching on the BBC, which ready hair and make-up artists to work throughout its output – Prime of the Pops to opera, BBC Two Playhouse to Grange Hill, and the compulsory Physician Who. In 26 years on the company, she was within the credit for all of those, and in addition went to Downing Road and Westminster to powder senior politicians for information broadcasts. Her evident present, nonetheless, was for BBC prime-product interval drama, and he or she picked up a Bafta for Charles Dickens’s Bleak Home (1985).
Westcott by no means misplaced curiosity in researching the historic framework inside which to create. Whereas making the mini-series of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1999), she couldn’t sleep for pleasure about concepts for the excesses of 1830s coiffures. The outcomes have been wacky, however precisely so: Westcott was a perfectionist who stored a tally of errors when watching any interval manufacturing.
She may need stayed on the BBC till retirement, however the establishment moved away from her within the Nineteen Nineties, breaking apart departments, outsourcing productions and ending profession administration. Westcott was protecting of her crews, who labored lengthy hours – if an actor was in at 6am to have florid sideburns glued on, the crew needed to be there effectively earlier than him, and wait to wipe the slap off after filming wrapped for the day: she insisted that they stayed in inns on location as a substitute of driving house at midnight. She knew actors relied on hair and make-up crews for emotional assist virtually greater than for his or her look.
Westcott took that crew chief function over to films in 1994, when, after a tough transitional interval on the BBC, she left to freelance. Her first commissions have been excessive in status however had budgets hardly larger than a significant TV play, which she circumvented by invention for The Insanity of King George (1994), with many characters in true but peculiarly comedian wigs, and the monarch’s pate close-cropped when mad, a tragic picture.
Shakespeare made Westcott a go-to rent for creating, as a lot as recreating, a previous and, although selective about what movie and TV gives she accepted, she packed a variety into her final working decade, together with Iris (2001), during which Dench inhabited the soul whereas Westcott didn’t instantly mimic the look of Iris Murdoch, and Stage Magnificence (2004), a narrative that toyed with gender in Restoration theatre, as exemplified by Billy Crudup sultry in a wig of ringlets and soot-darkened lashes.
A few of the sudden attraction of Marvel’s Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), set in the course of the second world battle, is all the way down to Westcott’s side-parted, short-back-and-sides “Aw shucks, ma’am” heroes’ haircuts, and the all-out Technicolor glamour styling of its few girls, particularly Hayley Atwell’s luscious waves and purple battle lipstick.
Westcott burdened how essential that no-longer-available craft coaching had been to her artwork and life. She was the daughter of John Rothwell, an RAF officer, and his spouse, Joyce (nee Henworth). The household moved house, and he or she modified colleges, incessantly, and he or she gained no instructional {qualifications}. Her father noticed her curiosity when she took a Saturday job in a hairdressing salon, and inspired her to take up a proper apprenticeship, after which to attend BBC Make-up Faculty, because it was recognized.
Her first marriage, in 1975, to Andrew Westcott, resulted in 1982. She is survived by her second husband, Jeremy Ancock, whom she married in 2003, and their twins, George and Harriette.
