Lisa Westcott obituary

To understand what a hair and makeup designer can do for a movie, look at the scenes depicting the court of Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love (1998), preferably on a big cinema screen, so that the heads and faces in close-up or medium shot – as in a third of almost all films’ footage – loom over six metres high. Gwyneth Paltrow has a pale modern glow achieved seemingly without cosmetics, and contemporary loose locks controlled by quasi-Renaissance plaits. Judi Dench’s high-foreheaded Queen looks as if lacquered with Liz’s original white-lead and egg-white. The brow curls and moustaches of Joseph Fiennes and Colin Firth come direct from 16th-century miniatures. And there are rows of court ladies, perfect frights with faces correctly blanched and raddled, surmounted with puffed, pearl-studded, false-hair “tires” – many clever variants of period dos.

Lisa Westcott, who has died aged 76, created that Elizabethan/contemporary screenful. She was Oscar-nominated for the work, and also for her Victorian headscape of smooth, centre-parted women’s hair and men’s wild whiskers in Mrs Brown (1997). She finally won an Oscar, shared with Julie Dartnell, for Les Misérables (2012), in which Victor Hugo’s characters visibly age and sicken on a screen swarming with the poor and dirty underclass – hundreds of extras to grubby up and dishevel for the barricades.

Almost all the leads had to be transformed daily from very healthy screen stars into the physically wretched, with straggle extensions to their beards, and prosthetic “slips” to make their flawless teeth look rotten or, for Anne Hathaway, recently pulled out. When Taylor Swift auditioned, unsuccessfully, to play the street derelict Éponine in the movie, Westcott stained her teeth brown, grimed her skin, dark-circled her eyes: Swift looked, as Westcott had designed her to, like death.

Westcott attributed her versatility and unflappability to her thorough initial training at the BBC, which prepared hair and makeup artists to work across its output – Top of the Pops to opera, BBC Two Playhouse to Grange Hill, and the obligatory Doctor Who. In 26 years at the corporation, she was in the credits for all of these, and also went to Downing Street and Westminster to powder senior politicians for news broadcasts. Her evident gift, however, was for BBC prime-product period drama, and she picked up a Bafta for Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1985).

Westcott never lost interest in researching the historical framework within which to create. While making the mini-series of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1999), she could not sleep for excitement about ideas for the excesses of 1830s coiffures. The results were wacky, but accurately so: Westcott was a perfectionist who kept a tally of errors when watching any period production.

She might have stayed at the BBC until retirement, but the institution moved away from her in the 1990s, breaking up departments, outsourcing productions and ending career management. Westcott was protective of her crews, who worked long hours – if an actor was in at 6am to have florid sideburns glued on, the crew had to be there well before him, and wait to wipe the slap off after filming wrapped for the day: she insisted that they stayed in hotels on location instead of driving home at midnight. She knew actors relied on hair and makeup crews for emotional support almost more than for their appearance.

Related: Letter: Lisa Westcott obituary

Westcott took that crew leader role over to movies in 1994, when, after a difficult transitional period at the BBC, she left to freelance. Her first commissions were high in prestige but had budgets hardly bigger than a major TV play, which she circumvented by invention for The Madness of King George (1994), with many characters in true yet peculiarly comic wigs, and the monarch’s pate close-cropped when mad, a tragic image.

Shakespeare made Westcott a go-to hire for creating, as much as recreating, a past and, though selective about what film and TV offers she accepted, she packed a wide range into her last working decade, including Iris (2001), in which Dench inhabited the soul while Westcott did not directly mimic the look of Iris Murdoch, and Stage Beauty (2004), a story that toyed with gender in Restoration theatre, as exemplified by Billy Crudup sultry in a wig of ringlets and soot-darkened lashes.

Some of the unexpected charm of Marvel’s Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), set during the second world war, is down to Westcott’s side-parted, short-back-and-sides “Aw shucks, ma’am” heroes’ haircuts, and the all-out Technicolor glamour styling of its few women, especially Hayley Atwell’s luscious waves and red battle lipstick.

Westcott stressed how important that no-longer-available craft training had been to her art and life. She was the daughter of John Rothwell, an RAF officer, and his wife, Joyce (nee Henworth). The family moved home, and she changed schools, frequently, and she gained no educational qualifications. Her father saw her interest when she took a Saturday job in a hairdressing salon, and encouraged her to take up a formal apprenticeship, and then to attend BBC Make-up School, as it was known.

Her first marriage, in 1975, to Andrew Westcott, ended in 1982. She is survived by her second husband, Jeremy Ancock, whom she married in 2003, and their twins, George and Harriette.

• Lisa (Susan Jean) Westcott, hair and makeup designer, born 11 March 1948; died 30 July 2024