Jack Young on AllMovie

Jack H. Young was one of Hollywood's longer active makeup men, from the 1930s and movies like The Good Earth and The Wizard of Oz at MGM to Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979). Jack Haydn Young was born in Illinois in 1910 and was trained as an artist and sculptor. He joined MGM in 1932, at age 21, during the depths of the Great Depression, working as an office boy. He quickly moved into the makeup department under its director, Jack Dawn, and worked on many of the studio's top productions of the 1930s, most notably The Wizard of Oz (1939), which employed dozens of artists in the makeup, costuming, and effects fields, and used thousands of makeup appliances on its myriad fantasy characters. He remained active for the next 40 years, though not without occasionally stooping down to independent productions such as Bert I. Gordon's The Cyclops (1957) and War of the Colossal Beast (1958). Both movies' plots involved radiation-spawned giantism and similar "special makeup" credits for Young, who worked on the same man, Dean Parkin (aka Duncan Parkin), for both. A grip-turned-actor, Parkin was made by Young into two of the more memorable late-'50s screen monsters. In The Cyclops, the actor wore a makeup appliance that covered the right side of his face completely, obscuring his eye and creating the appearance of a misshapen, twisted mouth and ruined jaw and teeth, and a protruding eye on his left side. In War of the Colossal Beast, when Glenn Langan, the star of the preceding movie, The Amazing Colossal Man, declined to do the sequel, Parkin filled the role, wearing an even more elaborate makeup design by Young, which made him look as though one eye was missing and the whole right side of his face and head were scarred and maimed. Young was back in major movies during the 1970s, including Lamont Johnson's A Gunfight (1971), starring Kirk Douglas and Johnny Cash; Phil Karlson's Walking Tall (1973); the made-for-television movie (and series pilot) The Hanged Man (1974), starring Steve Forrest; and the occult chiller The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975). He was making prosthetic masks again on the shoot of The Evil (1978), and did the special makeup for David Cronenberg's The Brood (1979). His last three projects -- Apocalypse Now (1979), Salem's Lot (1979), and Used Cars (1980) -- were all major productions in their respective fields and widely reviewed. His makeup for Salem's Lot, in particular, was the subject of critiques and reviews by horror movie experts. Young retired in 1982, at age 71, due to a neurological disorder.