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Make-up man Jack Pierce was born Jack
Piccolo in Athens, Greece, in 1889.
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He had been a professional baseball
player, a movie actor in the teens,
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an assistant director in the '20s
on action films
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like Buffalo Bill on the UP Trail
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and Davy Crockett
at the Fall of the Alamo.
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Very little is known about Pierce.
He could be temperamental,
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but apparently with people
who were so disposed themselves,
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like Elsa Lanchester,
who despised him, and he her.
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Boris Karloff and Jack got on famously.
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Susanna Foster thought the world of him
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and remembers him as a warm,
funny and down-to-earth man.
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She says that he had no trace of a Greek
accent, he was thoroughly Americanised.
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At the start of Phantom, he gave her
a copy of Fyodor Chaliapin's memoir,
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Man and Mask, which he thought would
be an overview of the profession
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for the 17-year-old beginning actress.
He taught her, for the first time,
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how to really do her own make-up
and to use a lip brush -
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how to bring out the features
that she had naturally.
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When he saw that she had done her
own make-up-incorrectly, by his lights -
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he would berate her.
"You didn't do what I told you!"
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"You bring the brush over like this!
And make the lip line do that!" he'd say.
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And of course, says Susanna,
he was always right.
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Miss Foster remembers that her on-set
make-up man for Phantom was Bill Ely.
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Jack said that he had
worked with Lon Chaney on the side
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at Universal in the early days, that
that was how he got his start in make-up.
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Unfortunately, this is a closed door that
we will probably never get to look behind.
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By 1927 Pierce had done
the astonishing monkey-man make-up
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for Raoul Walsh's Fox circus melodrama
The Monkey Talks,
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and he had prepared
Conrad Veidt's maniacal fixed grin
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for The Man Who Laughs at Universal,