Hair stylist created elaborate wigs for numerous stars
Designer’s career spanned more than 70 years
Paul Huntley, who has died aged 88, trained as an actor in London before becoming one of Hollywood’s leading hair designers, transforming Dustin Hoffman into a middle-aged woman in Tootsie and styling the tangled black and white nest Glenn Close wore as Cruella de Vil in the 1996 live-action remake of 101 Dalmatians.
For the stage he created wigs for The Producers, Mamma Mia! and a Broadway revival of Thoroughly Modern Millie.
In the course of a career spanning more than 70 years Huntley designed wigs and styled hair for more than 200 Broadway productions, beginning with Mike Nichols’s 1973 revival of Uncle Vanya, a project which persuaded Huntley to move from London to New York.
He went on to work on the original production of Cats using 1980s punk-fur made of yak hair, as well as revivals of Company, Sweeney Todd, The Music Man, Kiss Me, Kate and Cabaret among others.
One of his knottiest Hollywood assignments was the wavy bob that Dustin Hoffman wore in Tootsie (1982), in which he played an actor desperate to find work who auditions as an actress for a female role in a television soap opera.
Hoffman insisted that the effect must not look like a drag act, and he and Huntley experimented over several months with various colours, styles and lengths before settling on Huntley’s suggestion of auburn with a dense fringe which served to cover the tape that Hoffman used to make his eyebrows arch.
Although this artifice worked, Huntley would claim in a New Yorker interview that Hoffman failed to keep a promise to have him listed in the film’s closing credits, something he would tease the actor about when he later designed his balding head of hair for the part of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman.
Huntley made the jewelled braids that defined Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra, gave Patti Lupone an upswept ice-blond number in Evita and crowned Carol Channing with her extravagant bouffant in Hello, Dolly! in both the original in 1978 and the 1995 remake.
An expert at dealing with show business divas, Huntley likened his trade to an intimate collaboration. In the 1970s Marlene Dietrich, touring in cabaret, needed 14 identical blond wigs, which she would wear in rotation and return to Huntley for regular maintenance.
Having worked with Bette Davis on various film projects, Huntley offered to help with her personal appearances, deploring the “terrible” synthetic ready-towear wigs that she wore on television chat shows.
A dapper figure often clad in a black turtleneck sweater and tortoiseshell glasses, Huntley began his career in London in 1949 and started making wigs for the stage and films in the United States in 1971.
In 1994, for the role of Norma Desmond, he created Glenn Close’s turban-topped wigs in a stage adaptation of Sunset Boulevard to a design by Anthony Powell. Glenn Close specified Huntley as her hair stylist in all her contracts.
He also made the original wigs for the New York productions of Cats, Les Miserables and An Inspector Calls, in which he fashioned an Edwardian styling for Sian Phillips.
In 2002 his work on a Broadway revival of Hairspray, which called for more than 100 wigs made of human and synthetic hair, propelled techniques like “ratting” (to add volume and height) and “skunking” (twotone hair) into the mainstream.
One of five children of an Army officer, Paul Huntley was born on July 2, 1933, in London. From an early age he was fascinated by his mother’s film magazines, and particularly by the articles on the transformative properties of theatrical makeup.
On leaving school he sought an apprenticeship in the film industry, but finding the postwar job market flooded, studied acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where he became interested in wigs.
After National Service Huntley was trained by Stanley Hall at Wig Creations, the London theatrical company, eventually becoming his principal designer, working with stars including Vivien Leigh, Marlene Dietrich and Laurence Olivier.
Over the years Huntley adapted his techniques to meet technological advances, building fuller, taller wigs to accommodate mic packs and adding highlights to make synthetic hair more realistic and vibrant.
Huntley also worked on some 60 films, including the 2013 biopic Phil Spector, starring Al Pacino, for which he constructed the outsized “fright” wig Spector insisted on wearing during his trial for murder.
His last project, Diana: A True Musical Story (2020), is due to open on Broadway in November after a filmed version starts streaming on Netflix from October.
Huntley sourced the hair he used from Britain, where it was collected from hospitals, prisons and mortuaries as well as from salons, and sold by weight and length.
Every month he made a free wig for cancer patients who had lost their hair during chemotherapy.
Huntley was the recipient of a special Tony Award for Excellence in 2003.
Huntley’s longtime partner Paul Plassan predeceased him in 1991.