He's the man who blessed moviegoers with the "Terminator" robots, the "Jurassic Park" dinosaurs, Edward Scissorhands and most recently, Robert Downey Jr.'s suit in "Iron Man." Now word is spreading across Hollywood of the passing of legendary special-effects and makeup artist Stan Winston.
Representatives for the 62-year-old blockbuster king have confirmed to MTV News that Winston succumbed to cancer Sunday evening.
Born in 1946 in Richmond, Virginia, Winston studied painting and sculpture at the University of Virginia but moved to Hollywood in 1968 with dreams of becoming an actor. Finding jobs few and far between, he became an apprentice at Walt Disney Studios' makeup department, a path that would bring him four Oscars, two Emmys and millions of movie fans in debt to his enormous imagination.
Winston's filmography reads like a list of the best science-fiction films from the last quarter-century — The "Terminator" and "Jurassic Park" films, "Predator," "Aliens," "The Thing" and "A.I." included. A frequent collaborator with Steven Spielberg and James Cameron, in 1993 Winston teamed with the latter to co-found Digital Domain, a company that would become one of Hollywood's foremost digital and visual effects studios. His Stan Winston Studios would fuel everything from "Pearl Harbor" and "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" to the upcoming "G.I. Joe" and "Avatar."
Having spent several decades as the go-to talent for fantastical blockbusters' top-notch creations, Winston did much more than simply stick those "Scissorhands" claws on Johnny Depp. He inspired countless artists, launched untold careers in the industry and will be sorely missed.
At the time of his death, Winston and his company had been working on Martin Scorsese's "Shutter Island," Cameron's "Avatar" and several other projects. He was also planning to return to his beloved dinosaurs soon, as visual effects supervisor on "Jurassic Park IV." The degree to which Winston's work on such films was completed remains unclear at this time.
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