To understand what a hair and makeup designer can do for a movie, look at the scenes depicting the court of Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love (1998), preferably on a big cinema screen, so that the heads and faces in close-up or medium shot – as in a third of almost all films’ footage – loom over six metres high. Gwyneth Paltrow has a pale modern glow achieved seemingly without cosmetics, and contemporary loose locks controlled by quasi-Renaissance plaits. Judi Dench’s high-foreheaded Queen looks as if lacquered with Liz’s original white-lead and egg-white. The brow curls and moustaches of Joseph Fiennes and Colin Firth come direct from 16th-century miniatures. And there are rows of court ladies, perfect frights with faces correctly blanched and raddled, surmounted with puffed, pearl-studded, false-hair “tires” – many clever variants of period dos.
Lisa Westcott, who has died aged 76, created that Elizabethan/contemporary screenful. She was Oscar-nominated for the work, and also for her Victorian headscape of smooth, centre-parted women’s hair and men’s wild whiskers in Mrs Brown (1997). She finally won an Oscar, shared with Julie Dartnell, for Les Misérables (2012), in which Victor Hugo’s characters visibly age and sicken on a screen swarming with the poor and dirty underclass – hundreds of extras to grubby up and dishevel for the barricades.
