I’ve been reading David Kahn’s biography of Herbert Yardley, The Reader of Gentlemen’s Mail (Yale, 2004). A good book that usefully fills out Yardley’s life beyond the story he vividly told, somewhat unreliably, in his own The American Black Chamber.
Following the unauthorised publication of that memoir of US codebreaking in WWI, Yardley became persona non grata in Washington, with the result that he wound up for a period in China in the late Thirties breaking Japanese codes for Chiang Kai-Shek. One of the fellow foreigners he ran into in Chungking was, entirely unsurprisingly, Theodore H. White. Kahn introduces him thus:
Okaaaay - the latter claim is not one I’ve heard before. Kahn doesn’t footnote the point, but he’s colourfully describing a well-known figure making an incidental walk-on part in the book and I wouldn’t necessarily expect him to have done so.
Google throws up this paper (subscription required) on “The Jew as Wisdom Figure”, which notes a visual resemblence between the two, but that’s it. There doesn’t even appear to be a photo of White online to check the alleged facial resemblance.
Simple question therefore: was Yoda in any way White based on?
There’s a bit of resemblance around the eyes in Fear Itself’s link, but I seem to remember that Yoda’s eyes were based on Albert Einstein’s. Although I don’t remember where I heard that.
I recall seeing that in a “making of” documentary. The woman who finalized the character design said that Yoda was looking very vaguely creepy and unsympathetic, and didn’t come together until she modelled the eyes on Einstein, which finally brought some warmth to him.
Actually, the character was developed by famed makeup/effects artist Stuart Freeborn. He was also responsible for the apes in Planet of the Apes, the “dawn of man” sequence in 2001, the decapitation scene in Omen, and many other classic film characters.
Freeborn is still alive, and in a 2005 BBC interview, he says the original design for Yoda was based on a cast of his own face. He made some modifications, based on a photo of Einstein, to come up with the final product.
Dozens, maybe hundreds of individuals have been cited as the inspiration for Yoda. George Lucas has dismissed them all, saying simply that he needed a mentor character to replace Ben Kenobi, who was spoiler alert killed in the first film. "The inspiration for Yoda comes from the midgets seen in the Wizard of Oz. I thought it would be interesting to have the most powerful Jedi of his time be a tiny creature. "
