Angelina Jolie completely transforms into opera superstar Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín’s “Maria” through the hands of the Oscar winner’s personal makeup and hair team, Adruitha Lee and Pamela Goldammer.
While subtlety was key to the transformation, Lee and Goldammer worked to establish what that specific look needed to be. “You do have to look at the whole of [Callas] to understand her, or how she was adapting,” Jolie explains of the team’s process.
Callas was never without makeup, and her hair perfectly groomed. With a large scope of resources available, one photo in particular struck Jolie in which Callas is hunched over. “You can see her hair, she has her big glasses on, and she looks like she was caught.”
The thick glasses that Callas wore also caught Jolie’s attention. “That said a lot about her,” says Jolie.
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Lee also surrounded herself with photos when considering hairstyling and noted Callas’ natural wave.
Wanting the hair Jolie sports to look natural, Lee tried different methods. Traditional curling and flat irons and rollers didn’t work, but she found a solution. “I made rollers out of paper towels and rolled it up at nighttime, and we took it down the next day,” Lee reveals. “That was the curl, the natural look that I felt emulated what her hair naturally was.”
Jolie and Lee also discussed Callas’ gray. “She colored her hair to a certain point, and then she didn’t color her hair,” says Lee. With that in mind, Lee would adjust the coloring of the wigs to reflect the different stages and where they were in the storytelling. “At one point, I even added a few more gray hairs to the wig, and it was so pretty.”
Goldammer didn’t want Jolie’s makeup to be distracting. Her biggest challenge was navigating the multiple makeup changes and switches throughout the day.
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With the film capturing Callas’ operatic highlights and private moments, sometimes Goldammer had to build seven looks in any single day. “We were jumping between decades, stage looks, glamor and opera looks,” Goldammer says.
But it wasn’t as simple as creating those looks — a prosthetic nose was made for Jolie by makeup artist Arjen Tuiten, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work with her on “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil.” Says Goldammer, “I had to apply a prosthetic nose in 17 minutes, and beauty makeup in 30.”
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The film’s black-and-white sequences depicting when Callas meets Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, proved to be a different kind of challenge. To find the makeup colors that read the shades of gray they were looking for on camera, numerous camera tests were conducted.
“We tested 20 or 30 different lipsticks, and we stuck to specific shades,” she says, explaining her process. “But I remember drawing out like 50 different shades and printing it in black and white to see the effect. But in general, we stuck to colors of the time.”
For those same sequences, Lee had to make color adjustments to give Callas’ hair texture. “I didn’t want it to look solid, so there were different shades in the wig, so that it looked like it was one color, but it really wasn’t,” Lee says.