10 Under The Radar Talents Who Made Cinema Awesome

8. Jack Pierce (Make-up)

As much as James Whale, Boris Karloff, or Bela Lugosi, Jack Pierce helped to define what a "monster movie" looked like. In his long career as the head of the make-up department at Universal Studios, Pierce worked on just about every iconic horror movie of the time, including Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, and the Wolfman, as well as their numerous sequels. His painstaking methods eventually proved unpopular with many of the studios biggest stars because of the amount of time and painful application methods, and eventually he was let go, despite his already iconic work. Regardless of his reputation as a hard man to work with, Jack Pierce has been enormously influential on later makeup artists. He is an example of how someone who never shows up on camera, and who never received much in the way of awards or popular recognition, can singlehandedly change the way an entire genre of films is created, watched, and remembered.