I think Sydney Guilaroff deserves some props

I don’t actually have a lot to say about Sydney Guilaroff because plain and simple I don’t know much about the man, but what I do know is that he has one of the most impressive stat sheets in the movies.

I can’t think of anybody else who’s worked on as many great movies and with as many and as varied an amount of great directors. Guilaroff missed the very early days of MGM, his many decades of work with the studio started the year after Irving Thalberg passed away. Here’s a brief (he worked on nearly 400 movies) list in rough chronological order of some of the more impressive pictures he did hair on:

Viven Leigh in Gone with the Wind (uncredited), Dorothy’s Braids in The Wizard of Oz (uncredited), The Women, Shop Around the Corner, Philadelphia Story (and many many more times with Katherine Hepburn), Mrs. Miniver, Random Harvest, Ziegfield Follies, Easter Parade, Adam’s Rib, Asphalt Jungle, The Tall Target, An American in Paris, Quo Vadis, Singing in the Rain, The Bad and the Beautiful, The Band Wagon, Forbidden Planet, Gigi, The Law and Jake Wade, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, North by Northwest, Cimarron, How the West Was Won, Viva Las Vegas, The Cincinatti Kid, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Seconds, Point Blank, The Graduate, Rosemary’s Baby, The Split, The Gypsy Moths, They Shoot Horses Don’t They, and New York New York

The directors he collaborated with include:

Busby Berkeley, Ernst Lubitsch, Mervyn LeRoy, George Cukor, John Huston, Anthony Mann, Vincente Minelli, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Mike Nichols, John Frankenheimer, John Boorman, Roman Polanski, and Martin Scorcese

IMDB says that he was the “...First hair stylist to be listed in the credits of a film,” and also that he was the one who decided Lucille Ball should be a redhead. On a related tangent, while searching for that picture of Guilaroff to use in the baseball card, one of the first results was this totally NSFW picture:




Jesus Christ!