R.I.P. Greg Cannom, Oscar-winning makeup designer from Mrs. Doubtfire and more

One of Cannom’s earliest films included a fortuitous meeting, when he took a job as one of Baker’s assistants on Larry Cohen sequel It Lives Again. Cannom not only worked on the effects for the monstrous babies that menace folks in Cohen’s 1978 follow-up to It’s Alive: He also played one of them. (A feat he’d repeat years later, on another Baker collaboration: Cannom is one of several makeup professionals who can be seen prominently as zombies in Michael Jackson’s Thriller video.) Cannom had an early career breakthrough in the 1980s, providing director Joel Schumacher with vampire effects on The Lost Boys that heightened, rather than obscured, the charisma of the movie’s young cast, and from there his career began to skyrocket.

From 1990 onward, it becomes easy to perceive a steady chain of actors and directors clearly being impressed by Cannom’s work on one project, only to bring him on to work ever more miracles in another. Tim Burton used him early on for Big Top Pee-wee, then brought him back a few years later for a small addition to Batman Returns, sculpting Danny DeVito’s Penguin hands; DeVito, in turn, tapped him when he directed Hoffa a few years after that. Working on Steven Spielberg’s Hook in 1992 not only scored Cannom his first Oscar nomination; it also put him into contact with Robin Williams, leading to a multi-decade collaboration between the two men. That includes one of the two films that essentially solidified Cannom’s reputation in the 1990s, Mrs. Doubtfire. (He won one of his Oscars for that one, designing Williams’ altered face, which fellow winners Ve Neill and Yolanda Toussieng then built upon using more traditional makeup techniques.) The other movie—the one that first made Cannom’s designs truly internationally known—was Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

In later interviews, Cannom explained that Coppola had essentially given him carte blanche to design Oldman’s old-age makeup in the film, telling him, “I know nothing about makeup effects. You do whatever you want.” The result was an indelible series of monsters and images; despite only appearing in the aged makeup in the first portion of the film, the desiccated look Cannom created became a signature visual for Coppola’s movie. Old-age work, of varying levels of the fantastic, became a well-known aspect of Cannom’s work: He designed the appearance of “Old Rose” in Titanic, Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind, and Brad Pitt in The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, winning another Oscar, his fourth (after a technical win for co-inventing a new kind of silicone system that allowed traditional makeup to be applied to prosthetics) for that final one. He continued to work steadily throughout the 2010s, winning his last Oscar in 2019 for Adam McKay’s Vice, where he not only had to tackle the challenges of presenting Dick Cheney at multiple points in his life, but overcoming the skepticism of star Christian Bale, a famous advocate for handling his character transformations himself. Speaking in 2019, Cannom recalled the moment when Bale became fully convinced by the illusion of the work that had gone into the 63-year-old Cheney: “He thought it was interesting as we were going along, but he wasn’t really happy. But that day when he put it on, you could just tell he was so happy. He just kept looking in the mirror and smiling, and he really became excited at that point.”

Cannom’s last film work was on 2021’s The Eyes Of Tammy Faye. In 2023, Variety reported on a GoFundMe that had been launched on his behalf, detailing rising medical costs and a series of issues that stopped him from being able to work. The GoFundMe ultimately raised more than $100,000 from friends, family and fans. The comments on the page now serve as a sort of impromptu memorial, filled as they are with people effusing about the effects of seeing Cannom’s work transform and elevate their favorite films.