Gigi Williams: Last News

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” hair department head Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson, Viola Davis’ personal hairstylist, have become the first Black women to win an Oscar for makeup and hairstyling.Neal and Wilson won alongside Sergio Lopez-Rivera, Davis’ personal makeup artist. They beat out Mark Coulier, Dalia Colli and Francesco Pegoretti for “Pinocchio”; “Emma’s” Marese Langan, Laura Allen and Claudia Stolze; Kimberley Spiteri, Gigi Williams and Colleen LaBaff for “Mank”; and “Hillbilly Elegy’s” Eryn Krueger Mekash, Patricia Dehaney and Matthew Mungle. The award was created by the Academy in 1981 after the 1980 film “The Elephant Man” was not recognized.

When makeup and hair designers Gigi Williams and Kimberly Spiteri were approached for Mank, they jumped at the chance to craft looks for an Old Hollywood drama, set in an era they both loved.

Mank Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies Seyfried wore platinum bobbed wigs while makeup department head Gigi Williams applied makeup "somewhere between [Davies’] on-camera looks and our idea of her off-camera look." Adds assistant makeup department head Michelle Audrina Kim, "Working in black-and-white, it was key for us to shift our perspective of doing makeup; from picking products and colors not necessarily based on the color/hue, but on tonal value." Williams notes that for the director’s 1940-set film, David Fincher "didn’t want [her eyebrows] to be as skinny as the style was in that period … To create the same feel of thin brows we elongated her brows out to almost the outside corner of her eye and rounded it almost to a half-moon