Oscars 2011: The beauty of The Fighter

While the performances of Christian Bale and Melissa Leo are, deservedly so, sweeping the awards circuit and may do so again at the Oscars this Sunday, it’s the hair and makeup achievements of Leo’s Alice Ward and her seven scrappy daughters that I haven’t been able to stop lauding. A study in blue-collar beauty, the big hair and unflattering makeup was absolutely mesmerizing. Obsessed, I tracked down the head of the hair and makeup departments for the film: Johnny Villanueva and Donald Mowat—a Canadian—to grill them on the looks of the real life ladies from Lowell, Massachusetts.

Q&A with Johnny Villanueva

What direction were you given for the hair?

I drew from the real Alice Ward. Lowell is a great place but in a lot of ways, the hair stood still. David (O. Russell, the director) and I did a lot of research on that time period in Lowell. Alice had to be right on. I met with her and had pictures of her back in the day and Alice still pretty much wears her hair like that.

I heard that it was totally Melissa’s hair.

Totally. I had met with her before and she had never cut her hair before. She’s always had it long so it was a big thing for her to cut it. And let me tell you, it was a work in progress, cutting her hair. We cut it one way and then we needed to cut it more. She was game and then we did the colour.

As for the sisters, how did you come up their hair and approach styling them?

Each sister was an Alice. That’s how David and I approached it. Each one had a personality so we went through family photos. They had one sister who did all their hair, and it was horrible. It was my job to get them to look over processed and to look… how do I word this? Horribly great.

Once the colour was done, how did you come up with cuts? Did you look back to the 80s?

I worked in a salon in the 80s so I knew what I had to do to get those bangs up four feet high, or getting volume and leaving the back flat. Back then all the girls cared about was the front. Honestly, it’s not an easy look to do.  You think all you need to do is throw in some rollers and away you go but you really need to know when to stop, know when it should come down. And it’s hard to train your eye to get good at doing bad work.

How did you know when to stop?

It was more about the individual, about how she would do it. These girls were their own people. They didn’t care about the ‘80s or ‘90s. They were concerned with what they liked. And they were tough. That’s what inspired me.

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