Latest news with #'sDracula
Boston Globe
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Greg Cannom, who made Brad Pitt old and Marlon Wayans white, dies at 73
Advertisement 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). Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 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 male Black actors Marlon and Shawn Wayans into blonde white female residents of the Hamptons in 'White Chicks' (2004). Advertisement 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. 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), Carrey could still employ his customary outsize facial expressions. Mr. Cannom liked to freak out directors or even, ideally, himself. After careful study of Cheney's nose and the dimple on his chin for 'Vice,' Mr. Cannom designed looks for Bale to appear exactly like Cheney across five different decades of the former vice president's life. The day finally came when 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 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. Advertisement He later told Vox that he attained a new level of skill with old-age makeup on 'Titanic,' when he made 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 Wayanses 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 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. Bale had 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.' Advertisement 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,' 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.' This article originally appeared in
New York Times
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In ‘Krapp's Last Tape,' Gary Oldman Hits Rewind
For Gary Oldman, it is a homecoming of sorts. The English actor got his first professional gig at the Theater Royal in York, a small city 210 miles north of London, playing the titular feline in a 1979 pantomime production of 'Dick Whittington and His Wonderful Cat.' He went on, of course, to establish himself as a screen star, achieving global fame through acclaimed performances in movies such as 'J.F.K.,' 'Bram Stoker's Dracula,' and 'Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy.' Now, almost half a century after his York debut, Oldman — who lives in Palm Springs — has returned to the Theater Royal to direct himself in a revival of Samuel Beckett's 1958 one-man play, 'Krapp's Last Tape.' The run, through May 17, is almost sold out, and the playhouse has gone to town on merch, with signed posters and T-shirts on sale in the lobby. The story of this production is like an inversion of the play's: Oldman, 67, fondly revisiting a haunt of his youth in the twilight of an illustrious career, plays Krapp, an unsuccessful writer who, on his 69th birthday, looks back at his past self and sees only abject failure. Krapp emerges onstage, coughing and doddering, into a dusty study and sits down at a desk to rehearse an annual ritual: recording a monologue on a chunky, reel-to-reel tape recorder. First, though, he retrieves an old spool of tape, recorded 30 years earlier, shortly after a romantic breakup, and plays it back, pausing now and then to reflect and ruminate. The tape suggests a life waylaid by misdirected amorous energies and a penchant for drink. When Krapp finally passes comment, it is to condemn, matter-of-factly, 'the stupid bastard I took myself for 30 years ago.' The recorded voice has more lines than the flesh-and-blood Krapp; for the actor playing him onstage, the challenge is to achieve the right quality of stillness and silence, and to render the subtle shifts as he listens to the recording. Oldman, illuminated only by a single lamp above his head, draws us into Krapp's world by slowing down time. He eats a banana with excruciating deliberation, then immediately produces another one. Later, when he hears his younger self use a word whose meaning he has since forgotten, he shuffles slowly to a bookcase and pulls out a dictionary to look it up. During some drawn-out silences, the sporadic coughs of theatergoers in York seemed to converse with Oldman's onstage hacking. Oldman's face, set in brooding concentration, evokes a pained, vaguely incredulous mortification, which builds to a bitter, almost paralyzing ruefulness. His laconic, weary speech contrasts with the more expansive, and at times mannered, language of the voice on the tapes. Here is an irony: The younger Krapp was ridiculous but had a kind of self-belief; the older version sees things clearly, but is all out of juice. He dismisses his latest literary efforts in a single sardonic line, uttered impassively — '17 copies sold' — but the failed romance and subsequent decades of loneliness weigh more heavily. Realizing too late that he had blown his last shot at happiness, Krapp is sickened by his former hubris. The full force of it hits him as he hears his 39-year-old self declare that he wouldn't want his younger years back — 'not with the fire in me now.' Oldman's features gradually freeze into a rictus of despair, and the lights go out. 'Krapp's Last Tape' is, by conventional standards, a forbidding piece: one act, 50 minutes, relatively static and, despite moments of levity, emphatically bleak. Oldman's delicately understated rendering of Krapp heightens the curious dissonance between the play and the buzz around it. This 'Krapp's Last Tape' doesn't quite transcend the sense of occasion — but so what? A 'star vehicle' play can be useful if it brings high-end drama to a wider public. Sure, the production is powered by sentiment, and has some of the telltale features of a vanity project. (As well as starring and directing, Oldman also designed the set.) But the upshot is that 750 people packed into a regional playhouse, where they saw an ambitiously subtle performance of a challenging work. They were finished in time for dinner — a little demoralized, perhaps, but enriched all the same.
