Stan Winston, the renowned makeup, creature- and visual-effects wizard whose memorable work on “Aliens," “Terminator 2: Judgment Day" and “Jurassic Park" earned him four Academy Awards, has died. He was 62.
Winston died of complications from multiple myeloma Sunday at his home in Malibu, said his son, actor Matt Winston.
“The entertainment industry has lost a genius and I lost one of my best friends," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, of “Terminator" fame, said in a statement Monday. “Stan's work and four Oscars speak for themselves and will live on forever."
In a nearly four-decade career that began on television in the early '70s, Winston earned five Emmy Award nominations and shared Emmys for his makeup on “Gargoyles" (1972) and “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" (1974), for which actress Cicely Tyson was aged into a 110-year-old woman.
Winston, who segued into the movies the same decade -- he was the special makeup designer on “The Wiz" -- became a seminal figure in special makeup effects and animatronics.
“Stan has been involved in landmark, blockbuster movies for decades," J. Alan Scott, an animatronic effects supervisor at the Stan Winston Studio in Van Nuys, told The Times on Monday. “He was an innovator and a groundbreaker with new technology and new techniques for creating fantastical characters."
Winston, as the New Yorker magazine described several years ago, was known for “almost single-handedly elevating the craft of creature making from the somewhat comic man- in-a-rubber-suit monsters of the 1950s and '60s to animatronics -- electronically animated, part-robot, part-puppet creatures that have terrified millions of moviegoers."
Indeed, among the creations to come out of the Stan Winston Studio: the menacing, 14- foot-tall Alien Queen in “Aliens," the extraterrestrial jungle creature in “Predator," the futuristic cyborg assassins in the “Terminator" movies, and the life-size dinosaurs in the “ Jurassic Park" movies, which included a frightening life-size Tyrannosaurus rex.
Stan Winston Special-Effects Guru Won 4 Academy Awards
Steven Spielberg, in a statement: “I rode his cutting edge from teddy bears to aliens to dinosaurs. My world would not have been the same without Stan."
