Winston wanted to be an actor, but his “day job” won out: make-up artist. On his first film, Gargoyles (TV, 1972), he won an Emmy award for his work.
Over the years he advanced to prosthetics and animatronics, and was best known for making some special characters come to life: the Alien in Aliens (1986), the robots in Terminator 2 (1991), and the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993) — all of which won him Academy Awards (“Oscars”; he was also nominated for his work on Edward Scissorhands, among other films).
Winston was credited with “almost single-handedly elevating the craft of creature making from the somewhat comic man-in-a-rubber-suit monsters of the 1950s and ’60s to animatronics — electronically animated, part-robot, part-puppet creatures that have terrified millions of moviegoers,” the New Yorker magazine said in a profile.
“Special effects, by themselves, don’t mean diddly squat in a movie,” Winston once said. “If the characters I created can’t perform, can’t act and aren’t interesting, it just isn’t going to work. It doesn’t matter how good the technique is if you have not created interesting characters.” Winston died from multiple myeloma on June 15. He was 62.