When Cher won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1988 (for Moonstruck), her first thank-you went to “my makeup man, who had a lot to work with.” That was Engelman. His father was also Leonard Engelman, who died when his son was 11. Dad was a Hollywood makeup artist who worked on numerous Western genre films in the 1940s. The younger Engelman went into the business after graduating from Burbank High School, first working at Universal Studios for Alfred Hitchcock on Topaz. He went on to work on various TV shows and films, the latter most notably Cat People, Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, Rambo II, Rocky IV, Sleepless in Seattle, Batman Forever, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and (of course) multiple Cher films along the way — 67 credits in all, though the Internet Movie Data Base shows 77 credits: it mixes in his dad’s films because he had the same name.
In between jobs, Engelman trained generations of makeup artists at the Cinema Makeup School, and endlessly lobbied the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which listed makeup artists as “at-large” members, to create a Makeup Branch. They finally did, in 2006 — and elected him its first governor. That wasn’t enough for him: he then lobbied for a Hairstylist Branch. “I was told when I was starting off as a makeup artist that if you were going to be really good, you had to learn everything,” he said in an interview. “You had to learn beauty, all the characters, all the aging, all the hair work, all of the bruising, the prosthetics. I did everything I could to learn all of that” — including, on Rocky IV, pioneering the use of silicone prosthetics, rather than rubber. The Hollywood Makeup Artists & Hair Stylists Guild honored him with its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017; he had retired in 2013, with his last film being the TV movie Dear Mom, Love Cher. Leonard Alex Engelman died August 1, at 83.