Perc Westmore – makeup king of Hollywood

If you’re going to create heroes and heroines, villains and villainesses who look credible under the camera’s unrelenting gaze, you need fantastic raw material.

You also need brilliant make-up. And when it comes to make-up, Perc Westmore is the best in the business.

Perc (pronounced ‘Purse’) is the son of an English wigmaker and just one of a whole family of Hollywood make-up artists. He is Head of Warner Brothers’ make-up department and the highest-paid make-up artist in the world with a salary of $50,000 a year (well over half a million dollars in today’s money).

Of course he works with leading actresses such as Lauren Bacall and Bette Davis. So when he speaks, starlets (and indeed stars) listen – as the starlets gathered round him are doing in this picture.
He’s a real innovator, who has revolutionized make-up. To his credit are:

• The panchromatic base – a tan cream that keeps faces and lips from fading out by evenly reflecting all lights.
• A systematic approach to make-up based on a rigorous categorization of hair colour and facial type. For example, prior to Perc, studios described actresses simply as blonde or brunette. His system involves a chart of thirty five shades of blonde alone.
• The ‘hair lace wig’, which adds years of professional life to the likes of Bing Crosby, Charles Boyer and Fred Astaire.

And he’s formidable too. According to his nephew, Mike:

There are makeup people who didn’t work if they wronged Perc. Perc was a powerful guy in the business. Very creative and nice, but you didn’t cross him. He was a tidy guy. I remember he used to wear these white suits and never got anything on them.

Want to know more about Perc Westmore?

Look no further than Tattered and Lost.