Roger Dicken, the Oscar-nominated British particular results artist, sculptor and mannequin maker recognized for his work on Alien and When Dinosaurs Dominated the Earth, has died. He was 84.
Dicken died Feb. 18 at his dwelling in North Wales, Mick Cooper, a buddy of greater than 5 many years, informed The Hollywood Reporter.
On his first movie, Dicken was a member of the results workforce for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Area Odyssey (1968); later, he created and operated the dinosaur puppets seen in The Land That Time Forgot (1974).
Dicken sculpted a number of prehistoric creatures — plus a pair of full-sized pterodactyl toes — for the stop-motion journey story When Dinosaurs Dominated the Earth (1970), written and directed by Val Visitor for Hammer Movies. He and American animator Jim Danforth shared the Oscar nomination for visible results.
For Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), Dicken constructed and managed the terrifying chest-bursting creature that kills Government Officer Kane (John Harm) within the movie’s most iconic scene.
“I received beneath the set with my activated hand-operated alien, and it was this, in fact, that ended up showing revoltingly by his physique and pausing momentarily to twitch and breath, and so forth., earlier than zipping off the desk,” Dicken recalled in a 1992 interview.
“Two assistants, holding easy squeeze bubbles fastened to plastic tubes, made the small sacs within the physique pulsate, and so forth. The monster’s exit was achieved by pulling me alongside below the desk, laying on a trolley with my arm holding the puppet, working it by a slot because it knocked off strategically positioned utensils within the means of disappearing.”
5 folks shared the visible results Oscar for his or her work on the movie; Dicken was not one in every of them.
Born on April 15, 1939, in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, Roger Maxwell Dicken mentioned he beloved the “previous gorilla fits within the Nineteen Forties movies. I at all times needed to make one in every of these however solely received so far as creating an overhead ape masks with fur and papier-maché with which I scared the life out of a few native women returning dwelling from a dance late at night time.”
He and associates got here up with a comedy/horror routine for golf equipment during which he performed Physician Lugani, a grasp of “cemeteries” who introduces such characters as The Hunchback, Dracula and The Wolf Man.
“I’d do a fast change towards the top and play the Frankenstein monster, which went down very effectively in these days, carrying off a lady planted within the viewers to complete off the present,” he recalled.
A gathering with VFX legend Ray Harryhausen impressed him to strive the films, and he landed jobs with the BBC and made fashions for the Thunderbirds TV present earlier than going freelance to affix the workforce on 2001.
Dicken then created the moth monster for The Blood Beast Terror (1968), starring Peter Cushing, and labored on Witchfinder Common (1968), starring Vincent Worth.
He additionally got here up with bats for Scars of Dracula (1970) and octopuses for Warlords of the Deep (1978) and wrapped his profession with White Canine (1982) and The Starvation (1983).
Survivors embody his spouse, Wendy.