are those of George Westmore and his six sons; suc-
ceeding generations of the Westmore family have
continued to dominate the field.
Although many directors favor makeup that is as
natural as possible, we tend to notice makeup design
when it helps create an unusual or fantastic charac-
ter: Boris Karloff as the Monster in James Whale’s
Frankenstein(1931; makeup designer: Jack P. Pierce);
the self-transformation through science of Fredric
March from the mild Dr. Jekyll into the evil side of his
own character, the lustful and hideous Mr. Hyde, in
Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde(1931;
makeup designer: Wally Westmore); James Cagney
as the great silent-screen actor Lon Chaney in Joseph
Pevney’s Man of a Thousand Faces(1957; makeup
designers: Bud Westmore and Jack Kevan); the ape-
men in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey(1968;
makeup designer: Stuart Freeborn); or the varied
creatures in the Lord of the Ringstrilogy (makeup
designer: Peter King).Hairstyle During the studio years, hairstyles
were based on modified modern looks rather than
on the period authenticity favored in costumes.
Exceptions to this rule—such as Bette Davis’s
appearing as Queen Elizabeth I with shaved eye-
brows and hairline in Michael Curtiz’s The Private
Lives of Elizabeth and Essex(1939) and with a bald
head in the same role in Henry Koster’s The Virgin
Queen(1955)—are rare, because few studios were
willing to jeopardize their stars’ images. The idea of
achieving historical accuracy in hairstyle was com-
pletely undercut in the late 1930s, when the studios
developed a “Hollywood Beauty Queen” wig service-
able for every historical period. This all-purpose wig
was worn by, among many others, Norma Shearer
in W. S. Van Dyke’s Marie Antoinette(1938) (see illus-
tration on page 192) and Glynis Johns in Norman
Panama and Melvin Frank’s medieval comedy The
Court Jester(1955). Generic as this wig was, hair-
stylists could obviously cut and style it to conformDESIGN 193Hairstyles Because putting stars before the camera in
hairstyles from, say, the Greek or Roman period, the Middle
Ages, or even eighteenth-century France could threaten an
actor’s image with the public, American studios in the 1930s
devised the “Hollywood Beauty Queen” (HBQ) wig, which
could be cut and styled in a manner that was usually most
flattering to the wearer. [1] The stylized HBQ wigs Vivien
Leigh wore as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind(1939)were, according to experts, more suggestive of the 1930s
than the 1860s, the period in which the story is set. [2] The
HBQ wig worn by Maid Jean (Glynis Johns) in The Court
Jester(1955), however, has been styled more in keeping with
the 1950s than the Middle Ages, and although Hubert
Hawkins (Danny Kaye) is presumably wearing his own hair, he
also looks very contemporary.1 2