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Arts And Crafts
GOODHAIRDAYS
AWARD WINNING HAIR AND MAKE-UP DESIGNER CHRISTINE BLUNDELL TALKS TO QUENTIN FALK
Swapping a Stevenage salon for this year’s Hollywood Oscar podium reads like one of those rather fanciful tales that fair lit- ter the film industry. But when, less than a fortnight later, Christine Blundell then added a BAFTA mask to her first-ever Academy Award, it was a real- life double whammy of the most emphati- cally transAtlantic kind. The experience still causes the delightfully down-to-earth Blundell – who had been nominated for Topsy-Turvy, her fifth film with Mike Leigh - to giggle happily at the twin mem- ory. Los Angeles had all been about mas- sages, manicures, parties and “being shimmied around in limousines.” The Leicester Square event was, ironically, much more nerve-wracking because she was firmly back amid the concentrated gaze of her local peers and close mates.
All of which was admittedly, and very happily, a long way on from her first assignment at the back end of the eighties which most decidedly didn’t wreak of the sort of showbiz glamour she might have first envisaged after deciding to chuck in conventional hairdressing.
“They urgently needed,” she recalls, “someone at LWT who was ‘competent in hair’ for a weekend on the Isle of Man. It was a period production
and after they flew me out,
someone asked, ‘Brought
your clippers?’ It was, in
fact, all about short back-
and-sides. Basically I was
locked in a room for two
days shearing heads. It was
like sheep shearing.”
The SOS call had come
to the Make-Up Centre in
South Kensington where
Blundell enrolled after sell-
ing up in Stevenage and
moving back to London.
She’d embarked on a diplo-
ma course because the Centre had work- ing make-up artists teaching there. Salon work had become “very repetitive ... the challenge seemed to have gone.” Now she had films very firmly in mind.
Along with that shearing there was some prosthetic make-up work on Dave Willetts’ stage Phantom (Of the Opera variety) – facilitated by Trefor Proud, much later her assistant and fellow award-winner on Topsy-Turvy - as well as some TV sketch shows and the odd
Poirot. “One of the girls,” says Blundell, “then asked me to go and help on a film called Life Is Sweet.” That proved to be the first of a long and fruitful collabora- tion with director Leigh on, subsequently, Naked, Secrets &
Lies, Career Girls and, of course, Topsy-Turvy.
“The more I’ve worked with Mike the more I’ve got involved. It’s got to the point now that when the films are cast and the actors are begin-
ning to get their characters together, he’ll invite me in to watch some of the rehearsal. After that, you begin to get a foundation for the character and we can
then also start to work on the overall image.
‘Naturally there’s no script as such but Mike gives us [that’s Blundell, the produc- tion designer Eve Stewart and costume designer Lindy Hemming] a one page brief of what he wants to get out of
the story. The three of us then work together very tightly on the project because we need each other’s back-up. We’ve become a bit like the Witches of Eastwick,” she laughs.
“Approaching a film like Topsy- Turvy, the idea is not to become petri- fied by the fact that if something’s not periodically correct we’ll be hauled over the coals. In this case we had some pic- ture evidence of what people looked like; George Grossmith, for instance. We did all kinds of research. The people at the V & A were very helpful as well as various theatre archivists.
“ I was keen to have everything made up as correct as possible because I never knew whether it would be used as a prop or as, say, backstage theatre stuff. In the end, I wrote loads of billboards of things we’d researched so the actors would also know how to approach their make-up.”
Certainly, working the Leigh way is never less than challenging. “I’ve now been with Mike so long, I think I’m totally at ease with the way he films. When you finish and then work on other movies, you really don’t get fazed by anything because you’re used to someone coming up and saying, ‘Oh, we’ve just improvised this...’”
In between the Leighs there have been a wide variety of
other assignments, including Seven Years In Tibet (on which she was personal make-up artist to co-star David Thewlis) and The Full Monty, a fun and rather profitable stint, which also intro- duced her to standby carpenter Leon, now her partner and father of their two young chil- dren, Stan and Alf.
Says Blundell: “The best thing about films is
that every project is unique. I’ve learned stuff doing films I never learned at school. Suddenly history becomes enjoyable instead of being a chore.”
After finishing, most recently, on The Final Curtain – a John Hodge-scripted black comedy with Peter O’Toole and Aiden Gillen - for old friend and first time feature director Pat Harkins, she’ll be heading for the Iberian Peninsula to work on Terry Gilliam’s long-vaunted Don Quixote epic.
Photos from top right: working on Peter O’Toole in The Final Curtain; scene from Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy and the poster image of Seven Years In Tibet
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