I wonder why it’s so hard to make young people look older convincingly.
I recently watched a very recent very high budget movie and there’s a scene early on with young actors made to look older. I instantly knew these actors were younger, despite the filmmakers having the money to use the best makeup artists in the world.
It wasn’t the first time either. I doubt I’m particularly observant, so I’m sure many others have noticed this as well.
Well, I was pretty convinced by Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins. Well…I was five…
Aging is hard because old faces tend to become thinner and hollower. Makeup, OTOH, is all about adding stuff on. If you want to add wrinkles, for instance, you have to add some fake flesh for there to be wrinkles in, which mean that you end up making the face bigger and puffier. Just my WAG.
Mannerisms are a big part of seeming aged: trembling, tics, dry mouth, stooped over. As much as people might hate it, Bill Shatner’s part in The Deadly Years was very well done.
Dustin Hoffman (as a very young man) was very convincing in “Little Big Man”.
He wasn’t wearing just a dab of makeup, but a complete appliance. It starts out as a latex mold of the face, and allows you to do things, like carve into it, that you can’t do to the real thing.
Because whoever did the makeup for The Adventures of Baron Munchausen doesn’t seem to have ever shared his secret with anyone:
It annoyed me for years and years after seeing The Baron that there were so many movies with "old-age makeup" where it just looked like the person was wearing a plastic shall glued to their face because it was like, "C'mon people! The technology has been discovered! It's your job to go ask the dude how he did it!" And yet, they never did.That was the work of Dick Smith, makeup artist extraordinaire. He did the same kind of old age makeup on David Bowie for The Hunger.
And the fact that it’s mostly appliance doesn’t mean anything – I’ve seen plenty of appliance-aided “Old Age” makeup that’s appallingly bad, too. And it’s certainly possible to convincingly age a young person without extensive latex appliances – there are examples in Dick Smith’s own Monster Makeup Handbook. The use of collodion to create wrinkles, the use of shading to imply depressions – it can be done, but it takes some skill. And time. It’s possible that cases of poor “aging” makeup you have seen suffered from a lack of either money or time, if not of skill.
Here’s some of Smith’s work:
http://www.viralnova.com/dick-smith-makeup/
Here’s the work he did on David Bowie:
I think they did a damn good job with Johnny Depp as Whitey
because “looking old” is about far more than gray hair and wrinkled skin. my grandmother is almost 92, and it’s only in the past several years where she’s started to really look old. it’s things like thinning, pale shiny skin, sagging eyelids, posture, and loss of muscle tone due to inactivity.
Orson Welles’ old age makeover in Citizen Kane looked convincing (to give you an idea, Welles was actually twenty-six).
It’s easy to see if you can track someone through the years. Look at the progression in Paul Newman – who aged about as gracefully as anyone in history.
Look carefully at the sinking of his cheeks, the weakening of his jaw, the progressive turkey neck, even his ears look different.
Now, add hunched shoulders, a little stiffness in the walk from arthritis, trembling hands, a certain quaver in the voice, etc. Appearing old convincingly is a LOT of work.
The most appalling old age makeup job I’ve seen recently was on “Prometheus”. The old age makeup was amazingly bad for such a big budget film.
Best and Worst Old-Age Makeup
It’s much easier than making old people look younger.
Nice link, it reminded of some of the good ones that I’ve forgotten, like Brando in The Godfather.
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp: Same actor, same film.
Guy Pearce in Prometheus looked pretty awful, but at least his cartoon-like visage distracted me from the rest of that ridiculous film.
What about Estelle Getty on The Golden Girls?
The example of this that always sticks out in my head was the scene from the end of the last Harry Potter movie.
I think that if they really want to age actors for film they should make them stay awake for 74 hours then throw flour at them and start the cameras.
