Michael R. Thomas(1949-2009)
- Make-Up Department
- Actor
- Writer
Michael R. Thomas, born in Rahway, New Jersey, was raised in the Bronx
and then in Hazlet, New Jersey, where he taught himself how to apply
makeup for school plays. At around 18 years of age, he began working as
a go-fer at New York film studios and as a Metropolitan Opera makeup
apprentice. He made his on-camera TV debut on "Disc-O-Teen," a live
dance show of the mid-1960s; Thomas became a dancing regular, dressed
as Frankenstein's monster. In the 1970s he got a makeup job on TV's
Saturday Night Live (1975)
where, among countless other gigs during his 20 seasons there, he
collaborated on creating the look of the Coneheads. Film-wise he was
makeup department head on the Ghostbusters movies and applied
Michael Jackson's scarecrow
makeup for The Wiz (1978). His wife was
makeup artist Christine Domaniecki,
whom he met on the set of "Disc-O-Teen," lost touch with, then
re-encountered and fell in love with, 23 years later. Thomas' love of
the Universal horror movies of the 1930s and '40s prompted him to make
himself up to look like Bela Lugosi's Dracula and Ygor and appear at
horror movie-themed fan conventions throughout the country.
