Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 28, 1995 TAG: 9506280011
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Terry Bradshaw. Pat Buchanan. Newt Gingrich. Dick Cavett. Connie Chung.
Diana Churchman knew them all - and made them better.
As a makeup artist in Atlanta, where Churchman lived for more than 20 years, the Roanoke native and Lord Botetourt High School graduate (class of '61) made her living making faces. Old ones, new ones. Old ones into new ones, or just-like new ones.
She even made one young man look like Mark Twain at age 72.
"That was the first time I'd ever done the aging process by just building on a face like that," said Churchman (whose maiden name is Patterson). "It was a trip."
Churchman currently lives in Roanoke - where she cuts hair and occasionally does makeup at Hair Affair. "I was starting to get burned out in Atlanta," she said.
She returned to Roanoke in part because "people are still friendly here." She said she enjoys working on "real people" again.
But for 20 years, Churchman did makeup for actors and actresses appearing in regional and national commercials, and in industrial training films.
It was a job that brought her close - very close, in a way - to many of the celebrities who lived in or passed through Atlanta in those years.
She won three of the television industry's Emmy awards for makeup, scenery and set design on commercials before calling it quits.
Churchman didn't start out to be a makeup artist.
Passing through Southern Seminary College and Roanoke College in the 1960s, she majored in sociology and minored in art. Churchman said she has used what she learned then every day of her life.
"If you're going to work serving the public, it's good for a lot of things," Churchman said of sociology.
She got married while still in college, and moved with her husband to Columbus, Ga. They went to Atlanta together one New Year's Eve, Churchman said, and fell in love with it.
They later moved there. "When we divorced, he went back to Philadelphia, and I stayed. And kind of grew up with it," she said of the city.
She also went to work. "At that point I had a young child. Cleaning house and mowing the lawn for the rest of my life was not my idea of fun."
Churchman worked first with a talent agency, Atlanta Models and Talent Inc. Her biggest success in that field was landing an ex-football player and insurance salesman named Sonny Shroyer on the corn-pone TV comedy series "Dukes of Hazard." Shroyer - who played the dim-witted Enos - eventually got a show all his own.
"By that time," Churchman said, "I was into makeup."
Churchman taught herself to do makeup by consulting books and practicing on friends. Her name soon got around. "I was free-lancing, basically," she said. "I had no real training. ... After awhile, they realize they can trust your judgment."
Churchman worked mostly on actors in commercials - taking a shine away here, adding some color there. It has to be done, she said, since people look horrible on television without makeup. Not only do the lights and camera drain faces of color - "If you have a zit, it enhances it. ... When you see Dan Rather and those guys, they're all wearing it."
Even Richard Petty sat for a makeup job from Churchman before going on camera to make a Goody's Headache Powder commercial, she said.
Richard Petty wears makeup?
"He wouldn't wear much," Churchman said. In the end, all she really did was lift his trademark dark glasses, and put a little powder around his eyes.
She has made up Bill Elliott, too.
Mark Twain impersonator Bill Sanders of Atlanta heard about Churchman from a friend. He calls her "one of the best."
"She's so professional," said Sanders, a trade association executive who used to give several performances as Mark Twain a year. Sanders said he still flies Churchman out of Roanoke at his own expense to do his makeup when he performs. "She helps transform a character, not just put on makeup that makes somebody look old."
Every now and then, Churchman said, she can make a person into someone else entirely - though she has to have the raw material to work with.
The first time it happened was with a friend. She had known him for years, but suddenly one day saw the potential staring her in the face.
Churchman talked him into sitting for her. She padded him here, burnished him there, nipped and tucked - and voila!
Clark Gable.
He even let her shave his mustache pencil thin.
Churchman's three Emmys were for an assortment of commercials, and not any one in particular, she said. She has worked on commercials for several automobile manufacturers - among many others. People often came to Atlanta to shoot commercials because it is cheaper to do it there there than in New York or Los Angeles, she said.
So how long does it take to make up a star?
"It depends on how hung up they are," Churchman said. "Some actors, men as well as women, are so conscious of how they appear to the public. ... Of course, makeup and hair people are the ones who really know that."
So how much difference is there between "before" and "after"?
The change can be amazing, Churchman said. "It can be drastic."
by CNB