Greg Cannom, Who Made Brad Pitt Old and Marlon Wayans White, Dies at 73

New York Times

19-05-2025

Greg Cannom, an Oscar-winning movie makeup artist responsible for some of the most striking acts of movie magic in recent decades — including the transformation of Christian Bale into Dick Cheney in 'Vice,' the creation of a giant expressive green head for Jim Carrey in 'The Mask,' and the reverse aging of Brad Pitt in 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' — died on May 3. He was 73.
His death was announced by Rick Baker, a frequent collaborator and another of Hollywood's most admired movie makeup artists, as well as by the IATSE Local 706 Make-Up Artists & Hair Stylists Guild. Neither source provided further details.
An online fund-raising drive for Mr. Cannom posted two years ago listed a series of health challenges, including severe shingles, a staph infection, sepsis and heart failure.
Mr. Cannom won Oscars for best makeup for his work on 'Bram Stoker's Dracula' (1992), 'Mrs. Doubtfire' (1993), 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' (2008) and 'Vice' (2018).
In 2005, he won a 'technical achievement' Oscar for the development of a modified silicone that could be used to apply fantastical changes to an actor's face while retaining the appearance of skin and flesh.
Mr. Cannom's other work includes creating the look of the teenage vampires in 'The Lost Boys' (1987); giving Danny DeVito penguin hands in 'Batman Returns' (1992); aging the already octogenarian actress Gloria Stuart into a centenarian looking back on her youth in 'Titanic' (1997); and turning the male Black actors Marlon and Shawn Wayans into blonde white female residents of the Hamptons in 'White Chicks' (2004).
During the heyday of Mr. Cannom's career, big-budget films supplied him with as many as 15 or 20 assistants in charge of making molds. Whole teams would be devoted to sculpting, painting and the careful handling of foam.
Mr. Cannom, an expert in the human face, would give directions about, say, what expression should be conveyed by the nasolabial folds (the lines that run from the nose to the mouth), or what physiological meaning would be suggested by different lip shapes.
Even while radically changing actors with prosthetics, Mr. Cannom preserved what they needed of themselves. Mr. Pitt aged half a century in 'Benjamin Button,' but he always looked essentially like himself. Wearing an enormous fake green head in 'The Mask' (1994), Mr. Carrey could still employ his customary outsize facial expressions.
Mr. Cannom liked to freak out directors or even, ideally, himself.
After careful study of Mr. Cheney's nose and the dimple on his chin for 'Vice,' Mr. Cannom designed looks for Mr. Bale to appear exactly like Mr. Cheney across five different decades of the former vice president's life. The day finally came when Mr. Bale arrived on set fully in costume.
'Everybody just died,' Mr. Cannom told The New York Times in 2018. 'I was shocked. He looked just like him.'
Gregory Cannom was born on Sept. 5, 1951, in Los Angeles and grew up there. As a boy, he was a self-described 'monster geek' drawn to horror movies.
While attending Cypress College in nearby Orange County, he got his training doing makeup for about 200 school plays. He became a professional in 1976 by calling Mr. Baker, who hired him as an assistant. Their collaborations included Michael Jackson's 1983 'Thriller' music video, in which Mr. Cannom appears on camera as one of the zombies.
He later told Vox that he attained a new level of skill with old-age makeup on 'Titanic,' when he made Ms. Stuart, then 85 and long out of the limelight from her days as a 1930s starlet, look 101.
'She wasn't too happy about that,' Mr. Cannom recalled. 'She has this big comeback, and yet I wrinkled the hell out of her face.'
His work on 'White Chicks' gave him credibility as someone who could sustain a complete, realistic transformation of actors throughout a film. 'The studio said, 'We don't think it can be done,'' he told The Los Angeles Times in 2004. 'Then it was my job to prove everyone wrong.'
He did makeup on the Wayans 50 or 60 times, he estimated, using 'orange-ish' adhesive paint: A light-pink color on dark skin came out gray, he found.
The success of that movie prepared the way for his more dramatic work on 'Benjamin Button.' The director, David Fincher, demanded that thin coats of old-age makeup applied to Mr. Pitt be done the exact same way across scenes — accuracy to a sixteenth of an inch.
In an interview with Screen Daily, Mr. Cannom said the work he did on that movie was not only arduous but also 'terrifying' — and the best of his career.
In the 2010s, Mr. Cannom's phone stopped ringing; he figured he was widely thought to be dead, he told The Los Angeles Times in 2019. Then he got the chance to be the makeup character designer for 'Vice,' which earned him his final Oscar.
Mr. Bale had famously dropped about 60 pounds to play an undernourished insomniac in 'The Machinist' (2004) and then quickly acquired the physique of a bodybuilder to play the starring role in 'Batman Begins' (2005). Yet Vanity Fair commented in 2018 that his emergence as Dick Cheney 'may be the actor's most haunting transformation yet.'
Information about Mr. Cannom's survivors was not immediately available. He lived in Palm Springs. In recent years, he joined other special-effects artists in decrying a decline in what studios, influenced partly by growing reliance on digital technology, would spend on makeup.
At the 2016 conference of Monsterpalooza, an annual event held in honor of creature and makeup work, Mr. Cannom won a lifetime achievement award. It was presented by Gary Oldman, who had worked with Mr. Cannom on multiple films, including 'Bram Stoker's Dracula.'
Of the many hundreds of hours he had spent in a makeup chair, none were 'more satisfying and more rewarding than when I was in Greg's chair,' Mr. Oldman said. 'I used to doze off and have a sleep during the application because I was so relaxed and reassured, knowing that I was in the hands of an artist, a master craftsman.'