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Christine at home with her Oscar and Bafta |
Christine’s made up with Oscar success
Make-up artist Christine Blundell tells Roisin Gadelrab some Hollywood secrets
SHE’S run her fingers through Daniel Craig’s locks, waved a breast pump at Brad Pitt and collected an Oscar in a shock non-designer dress.
Christine Blundell is no Hollywood leading lady, she’s not even a household name. But she’s the woman the stars rely upon when it comes to making them look good.
TV and film make-up artist Christine, 45, has already raked up an Oscar, a Bafta and worked with Angelina Jolie, Peter O’Toole and director Mike Leigh.
Christine, who lives in Holloway, is planning to open a New York loft-style make-up academy on the site of the old Proud Gallery on Greenland Street, Camden Town.
“As soon as we walked into it I felt that was the place it was meant to be,” she said.
“We’re getting old barber’s chairs in, it’s going to have a real retro feel to it.”
Making the most of her movie pedigree, she says she hopes to take students on set wherever possible. She adds: “In a few years time I’d like to be in a position where we can say we can offer a scholarship. I don’t want the school to be something that’s unobtainable.”
Plying her trade in Africa, the Bahamas, Berlin and Nicaragua, Christine’s inventiveness has won her high praise in a highly competitive trade.
When she ran out of hair for the Chinese beards on the Steve Coogan and Jacky Chan film ‘Around The World in 80 Days’, she turned to horse hair, and to get the authentic look on a hanged body in Africa, she stuffed a prosthetic corpse with pig intestines to attract the flies,” she recalls. “I once turned a Highland cow into a yak, I sprayed him a different colour, tonged his fringe and gave him a white blaze down his face for a commercial.”
It was her ability to interpret Mike Leigh’s unusual approach Gilbert and Sullivan biopic Topsy Turvy which won her an Oscar in 1999.
But she had to turn down a designer dress when she joined the Versace-clad Hollywood crowd to pick up her award, six weeks after giving birth to her youngest son.
The single mum, whose artistry beat Austin Powers, The Nutty Professor and Bicentennial Man to the Oscar podium, says: “I ended up buying my own stuff. Amanda Wakeley offered to dress me but it didn’t look right on me at all. I’d only just had Alfie and I was the very lactating mother.
“I was there for 48 hours with a breast pump running in and out of toilets. I threw the Oscar down, grabbed my bag, and heard this shout ‘Oi Blundell’. It was Brad Pitt, he was hugging me while I was trying to get out of the Academy to express milk.”
Her time working on make up for David Thewlis on ‘Seven Years in Tibet’ brought her several invites to Brad Pitt’s barbecues.
But it’s not all fun and games. She says: “I’ve stayed in some of the finest places in the world. It feels and sounds really glamorous but on the flipside you are working from 5am till 8 or 9pm. You have easy days and hard days and you’re expected to balance between the two with a smile on your face.”
Having worked her way up, these days Christine regularly plays make-up assistant or hairstylist to big screen names such as Natalie Portman in Closer, Angelina Jolie in Hackers and is currently contracted to Naomi Watts in David Cronenberg’s latest offering Eastern Promises.
Her film credits include The Constant Gardener, Vera Drake, and The Full Monty.
Most recently, she had the privilege of tending to Daniel Craig’s hair on Casino Royale, recently joining the cast and crew at the Bafta award ceremony.
Interestingly, her passion, she says, has always been less for beautifying than for creating something new. As a young girl growing up in Watford, the future Oscar winner was often to be found with a pair of clippers in her hand, chopping the locks of anyone who dared volunteer.
“It was just something that came very naturally to me,” she says. “There was never a point where I decided I wanted to be a make-up artist or a hairdresser. It was just something I could do and that I found very easy. I was never fascinated by make-up as much as making people look a different way.”
Aged 18 and with no formal training, Christine moved to Camden and took her artistic sensibilities to a punk band called Filthy Habits where she could freely indulge her passion for creative make-up and asymmetrical haircuts.
When that ended, she opened a successful hairdressing salon, selling that after four years for a hefty profit.
It was the proceeds from that which allowed her to invest in an intensive three-month make-up course. Her first break came soon after with a job on the Phantom of the Opera.
Now living with sons Alfie, seven, and Stanley, nine, in Holloway, she cut her teeth on Mike Leigh films.
“I was working on Topsy Turvy for a year before the cameras rolled,” she says. “When you have someone as iconic as Mike Leigh doing a period piece, which he hadn’t done before, you have to be really careful the stuff you’re doing is absolutely accurate. All the wigs were hand-made exactly how they were in Victorian times.”
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