For more than 20 years, makeup artist Ve Neill has been transforming Hollywood actors. She turned Robin Williams into an elderly woman in Mrs. Doubtfire, Martin Landau into classic horror-film star Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood, and Michael Keaton into a devilish ghoul in Beetlejuice. She won Academy Awards for each of those films.
Neill is currently nominated for her fourth Oscar, for her work on Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. For Intersections, a Morning Edition series on artists and their inspirations, NPR's Elizabeth Blair reports.
Neill says that, as a little girl, she loved scaring herself "silly" watching monster movies on TV. She finally stopped after watching The Beast with Five Fingers -- a 1946 film about a murderous severed hand -- one time too many. "Mother tired of me being scared, waiting to see if this hand was going to jump out at me," Neill says.
Neill had another childhood hobby: painting her cousins' faces -- with lipstick, shoe polish, whatever was available. Her interest was further piqued by Leo Lotito, a neighbor who worked as a makeup artist on several TV shows, and often helped out with Neill's Halloween costumes. "I remember saying, 'Oh, Mr. Lotito, I want to do what you do when I grow up,'" she says.
At 18, Neill began working as a costume designer for a rock band that wanted funky, space-age outfits. A trip to a science-fiction convention for inspiration turned into a career-making run-in with Fred Phillips, the man behind the look of the original Star Trek TV series. Phillips took Neill under his wing, and gave her a big break -- a job on 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Since then, the jobs have poured in.
Neill considers herself blessed to have made a career out of a strong childhood urge: "I think it's just one of those… rudimentary desires to see if you can look weird, or different, or be scary, or be a fantasy creature or -- I don't know. It's a sickness, that's what it is."
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