Paul Engelen, ‘Phantom Menace,’ ‘Gladiator’ and ‘Game of Thrones’ Makeup Designer, Dies at 75

Paul Engelen, the British makeup designer who earned two Emmys and two Oscar nominations in a fabulous career that included work on Reds, Batman, The Phantom Menace, Gladiator and Game of Thrones, has died. He was 75.

Engelen died Nov. 3 of cancer at his home in West Sussex, England, his son-in-law (and fellow makeup designer) Daniel Lawson Johnston told The Hollywood Reporter.

Engelen also did makeup for three James Bonds — Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig — on the 007 films The Man With the Golden Gun (1974), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Moonraker (1979), Die Another Day (2002), Casino Royale (2006) and Quantum of Solace (2008).

He teamed with Blake Edwards on Victor/Victoria (1982), Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) and Curse of the Pink Panther (1983), with Steven Spielberg on Empire of the Sun (1987) and Munich (2005) and with Ridley Scott on Gladiator (2000), Kingdom of Heaven (2005) and Robin Hood (2010).

Engelen shared his first Academy Award nom with Rick Baker for Hugh Hudson’s Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) and his second with Daniel Parker and Carol Hemming for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), directed by Kenneth Branagh. He lost out on Oscar night to Amadeus and Ed Wood, respectively.

Frankenstein, with Robert De Niro as the creature, “was hard work,” he recalled in 2006. “And certainly one of the toughest films, from a makeup point of view, that I’ve worked on. And it’s impossible to have any other life when you are at work at 3 am every morning preparing the actors for hours in the makeup chair. It is very demanding, and you have people in the chair for hours at a time. And you have to get it on properly and — people forget — you have to get it off properly, too.”

Engelen was Nicole Kidman’s makeup artist when she famously donned a three-piece prosthetic nose for her Oscar-winning performance in Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (2002) and a makeup designer and hair designer on Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain (2003), which featured an Oscar-winning turn by Renée Zellweger.

He also came up with the third nipple for the evil Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) in The Man With the Golden Gun and the red and black visage for the villainous Darth Maul in George Lucas’ Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace (1999).

Engelen earned six Emmy nominations for toiling on the first three seasons of HBO’s epic Game of Thrones, winning in 2012 and ’13.

The youngest of four kids, Paul Engelen was born on Oct. 30, 1949, in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, England. He enrolled at Twickenham Art College at age 17 and met makeup artist Tom Smith, who hired him as an assistant on Carol Reed’s Oliver! (1968), Clive Donner’s Alfred the Great (1969) and Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971).

He would do 11 films with Moore and spend a whopping 45 weeks on the Warren Beatty-directed Reds (1981). 

Outside of Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), Engelen’s résumé included Milos Forman’s Ragtime (1981), Alan Parker’s Pink Floyd — The Wall (1982), Frank Oz’s Little Shop of Horrors (1986), Kevin Reynolds’ Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), Renny Harlin’s Cutthroat Island (1995), Phillip Noyce’s The Saint (1997), Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Seven Years in Tibet (1997), Simon West’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004), Brett Ratner’s Hercules (2014), Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (2017) and much more.

In addition to Lawson Johnston — his credits include the upcoming Gladiator II and many projects with his father-in-law and mentor — Engelen’s survivors include his wife, Lizzie, whom he first met in kindergarten; his daughters, Sam and Georgie; and four grandchildren.

Rhett Bartlett contributed to this report.