HOLLYWOOD — A good wig is one you never notice, and Yolanda Cruzado spent sixty years making wigs nobody noticed, which is the highest praise the work allows.
Ms. Cruzado, a wig master who built and dressed hair for film and theater productions across the region, died March 9 at a care facility in Glendale. She was 87. Her son said the cause was complications from a stroke.
The trade she practiced is slow, exacting and largely invisible. A film wig is not bought off a shelf; it is built on a lace foundation shaped to the actor’s head, into which the wig maker knots individual hairs, a few at a time, with a tiny hook — a process called ventilating that can take a skilled maker weeks for a single hairline. Done well, the lace disappears against the skin and the hair looks as though it grew there. Done poorly, it announces itself from the back row. Cruzado’s work, colleagues said, was of the kind that disappeared.
She could age an actor thirty years with gray she blended by hand, or take those same years off by lunchtime for a flashback scene. She built the towering powdered wigs of period pictures and the plain, careful hairpieces that let a balding leading man keep his secret. On the stage she dressed the same wig night after night, resetting curls that a performer’s sweat had wilted, because a wig that must survive eight shows a week is a different animal from one that must survive a single take.
“Yolanda could look at an actor’s own hairline and match it so you couldn’t find the seam with your nose an inch away,” said Miriam Halbritter, a wardrobe supervisor who worked beside her for years. “Directors never thanked her, because they never knew there was anything to thank her for. That was the whole point, and she was proud of it in a way that didn’t need saying.”
Yolanda Cruzado was born in 1937 and learned the craft as a young woman from an older wig maker who, she said, made her ventilate and pull out the same square of lace a dozen times before letting her keep a day’s work. She was unsentimental about the labor and fierce about the standard. She kept working into her late seventies, taking on the theater jobs that the studios, increasingly, no longer had the budget or the patience for, and she grumbled about productions that slapped on a cheap wig and lit around it.
In her last working years she taught the ventilating hook to a few younger stylists, warning them the craft rewarded no one who was in a hurry. She left her tools and a case of finished wigs to a theater company, with instructions that they be worn and re-dressed rather than shelved.
She is survived by a son, a daughter, three grandchildren, and by an audience of millions who watched her work for a lifetime and, exactly as she intended, never saw it.