The only Irish person to win two Academy Awards, make-up wizard Michele Burke, looks likely to win her third tomorrow night for her transformations of Mike Myers and his co-stars in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. She won her first Oscar for Quest For Fire in 1982 and her second for Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1993.
Long based in Los Angeles, she grew up in Kildare in the 1950s and moved to Dun Laoghaire with her family when she was 13. A career in movies was the last thing on her mind, she says, when she studied at Mount Anville and at the Sacred Heart in Monkstown.
While working as an interpreter in Montreal she became involved in staging fashion shows and took a course in make-up. She worked on fashion shows and magazine layouts, including Vogue covers, before starting in movies with the 1980 Terror Train. One of her most elaborate tasks was to design the prominent proboscis worn by Gerard Depardieu in Cyrano de Bergerac. She made 150 noses from that prototype, a fresh one for each day's filming.
ONLY once in the past 15 years has the movie with the most nominations not gone on to win the best picture Oscar - in 1991 when Bugsy, which had 11, was beaten by The Silence of the Lambs, which had seven. That's good news for American Beauty, which leads the field this year with eight nominations - the lowest tally for a front-runner since Rain Man led the pack with eight in 1989 - and won the best picture Oscar.
Katharine Hepburn's long-held distinction as the most nominated actor in Oscars history is now shared with Meryl Streep, who scored her 12th nomination this year, for Music of the Heart. However, Hepburn's nominations yielded her four Oscars, all for best actress, while Streep has received two - best supporting actress for Kramer vs Kramer in 1979 and best actress for Sophie's Choice in 1982. On the other hand, Hepburn achieved her 12 nominations over the course of 49 years, while Streep did it in just 22 years and surely has many more ahead of her.
American actors take 14 of this year's acting nominations, with four going to British actors - Janet McTeer, Samantha Morton, Jude Law and Michael Caine - and two to Australians, Toni Collette and Russell Crowe, (who was born in New Zealand but raised in Australia). All six non-Americans are playing American characters in their nominated roles, while US actress Julianne Moore is nominated for playing an Englishwoman in The End of the Affair.
Among the many high-profile directors whose new films failed to earn even a single Oscar nomination this year are Oliver Stone (Any Given Sunday), Martin Scorsese (Bringing Out the Dead), Milos Forman, (The Man in the Moon), Jane Campion (Holy Smoke), Atom Egoyan (Felicia's Journey), Barry Levinson (Liberty Heights), David O Russell (Three Kings), Robert Altman (Cookie's Fortune), Steven Soderbergh (The Limey), Ang Lee (Ride With the Devil) and Tim Robbins (Cradle Will Rock) and the late Stanley Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut).