Stanley Winston (April 7, 1946 – June 15, 2008) was an American television and film special make-up effects artist, best known for his work on the Terminator franchise, the Jurassic Park trilogy, Aliens, The Thing, the first two installments of the Predator franchise, Inspector Gadget, Iron Man and Edward Scissorhands. He won a quartet of Academy Awards for his work. Winston, a frequent collaborator with directors James Cameron, Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton, owned several effects studios, including Stan Winston Digital. The established areas of expertise for Winston were in makeup, puppets and practical effects, but at the time of his death, he had expanded his studio to encompass digital effects as well.
Early life Winston was born on April 7, 1946, in Richmond, Virginia to a Jewish family, where he graduated from Washington-Lee High School in 1964. He studied painting and sculpture at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, from which he graduated in 1968.
Career In 1969, after attending California State University, Long Beach, Winston moved to Hollywood to pursue a career as an actor. Struggling to find an acting job, he began a makeup apprenticeship at Walt Disney Studios.
1970s In 1972, Winston established his own company, Stan Winston Studio, and in 1973, he won an Emmy Award for his effects work on the 1972 telefilm Gargoyles. Over the next seven years, Winston continued to receive Emmy Award nominations for work on projects and won another for 1974's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Winston also created the Wookiee costumes for the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special. In 1978, Winston was the Special Make-up Designer for The Wiz.
1980s In 1982, Winston received his first Oscar nomination for Heartbeeps, by which time he had set up his own studio. However, it was his ground-breaking work with Rob Bottin on his update of the science fiction horror classic The Thing that year that brought him to prominence in Hollywood. He also worked on supervised vision work on The Entity. Between then, he contributed some special effects to Friday the 13th Part III, in which he made a slightly different head sculpt of Jason in an unused ending. In 1983, Winston designed the Mr. Roboto facemask for the American rock group Styx. In 1983 he also worked on the short-lived television series Manimal, for which he created the panther and hawk transformation effects. Winston reached a new level of fame in 1984 when James Cameron's The Terminator premiered. The movie was a surprise hit, and Winston's work in bringing the titular metallic killing machine to life led to many new projects and additional collaborations with Cameron. In fact, Winston won his first Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in 1986 on James Cameron's next movie, Aliens. Over the next few years, Winston and his company received more accolades for its work on many more Hollywood films, including Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands, John McTiernan's Predator, Alien Nation, The Monster Squad, and Predator 2. In 1988, Winston made his directorial debut with the horror movie Pumpkinhead, and won Best First Time Director at the Paris Film Festival. His next directing project was the child-friendly A Gnome Named Gnorm (1990), starring Anthony Michael Hall.
1990s James Cameron drafted Winston and his team once again in 1990, this time for Terminator 2: Judgment Day. T2 premiered in the summer of 1991, and Winston's work on this box office hit won him two more Academy Awards for Best Makeup and Best Visual Effects. In 1992, he was nominated for another Tim Burton film, the superhero sequel Batman Returns, where he designed the makeup prosthetics for Danny DeVito's Penguin. Additionally, his studio was commissioned to create robotic penguin puppets that were used throughout the film. Winston turned his attention from super villains and cyborgs to dinosaurs when Steven Spielberg enlisted his help to bring Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park to the cinema screen. In 1993, the movie became a blockbuster and Winston won another Oscar for Best Visual Effects. In 1993, Winston, Cameron and ex-ILM General Manager Scott Ross co-founded Digital Domain, one of the foremost digital and visual effects studios in the world. In 1998, after the box office success of Titanic, Cameron and Winston severed their working relationship with the company and resigned from its board of directors. Winston and his team continued to provide effects work for many more films and expanded their work into animatronics. Some of Winston's notable animatronics work can be found in The Ghost and the Darkness and T2-3D: Battle Across Time, James Cameron's 3-D continuation of the Terminator series for the Universal Studios theme parks. One of Winston's most ambitious animatronics projects was Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which earned Winston another Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects. In 1996, Winston directed and co-produced the longest music video of all time, Ghosts, which was based on an original concept of Michael Jackson and Stephen King. The long-form music video presented a number of never before seen visual effects, and promoted music from Blood on the Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix, which went on to become the biggest selling remix album of all time (13 million).
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