WINSTON, STAN

WINSTON, STAN (1946– ), U.S. director and visual effects artist. Winston grew up in Arlington, Virginia. After graduating from the University of Virginia in 1968, Winston moved to Los Angeles to be an actor. Influenced by Lon Chaney, who did his own makeup in Phantom of the Opera (1943), Winston became a makeup apprentice with Walt Disney Studios. He worked 6,000 hours for Disney, which culminated in his first Emmy win for the television movie Gargoyles (1972). Among his first jobs after leaving the studio in 1972 were cosmetically aging actress Cicely Tyson to 110 in the television movie The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974), which led to another Emmy win, and makeup work on the set of the miniseries Roots (1977). He earned his first feature film makeup credit for The Wiz (1978), and received his first Oscar nomination for his work on the robot comedy Heartbeeps (1981). In 1978, he founded Stan Winston Studio in Van Nuys, California. Winston provided visual effects and second-unit direction for the groundbreaking science fiction film The Terminator (1984). This collaboration with director James Cameron led to his   helming the special effects unit and creating alien effects for Aliens (1986), which won Winston his first Oscar. In 1987, he earned a third Oscar nomination for his creation of the alien in Predator (1987), and in 1988 he directed his first feature film, Pumpkinhead. Winston earned a fourth Academy Award nod for makeup work on Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands (1990), but won Oscars for makeup and visual effects when he joined Cameron on the big-budget Terminator sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). The Penguin makeup he created for Danny DeVito in Burton's Batman Returns (1992) led to his seventh Academy Award nomination, and after directing his second feature, the straight-to-video The Adventures of a Gnome Named Gnorm (1994), Winston won a fourth Oscar for creating the life-sized dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993). Winston, Cameron, and Industrial Light and Magic designer Scott Ross joined forces in 1993 to form Digital Domain, a computer animation special effects company whose first project was the much publicized adaptation of Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire (1994). However, he and Cameron eventually resigned from the company in 1998. Winston signed a development deal with Dream Works in 1996, and one year later he founded Stan Winston Productions, which provided special effects, animatronics and makeup for films such as The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), which earned him his ninth Oscar nomination; End of Days (1999); Jurassic Park III (2001); A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), his 10th Academy Award nod; Pearl Harbor (2001); Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003); and Constantine (2005). (Adam Wills (2nd ed.)