Sweet as sugar, cold as ice
By Gabrielle Winkel, Soap Opera Weekly, 1990	Home   Cette page en Français

Next time someone wants to borrow a cup of sugar, think twice. It may not be for brownies.

Santa Barbara fans know that Sasha Schmidt has been dead and frozen for a few weeks - one look at actress Michelle Nicastro on ice in Mason and Julia's freezer and then in the Capwell crypt makes it clear she's gone. But is she really frozen ? Are those real icicles on her face ?

"It's quite simple, all you do is mix sugar and water together and paint it on her face with a brush and let it dry. It could be done with chemicals - gels and things - but this was the best way we could do it in terms of saving the actor's skin" says Santa Barbara's Emmy award winning makeup artist, Carlos Yeaggy.

There was a lot of research behind Nicastro's death look. Yeaggy recalls : "After some phone calls to the Los Angeles morgue, I got a whole explanation on it - more than I needed to know. So we did a makeup that looked much like Frankenstein's bride and created a pale gray-purple kind of color for her skin with highlights and shadows. You use the sugar and water kind of like paste. A lot of it depends on your artistic ability to create those icicles, but it's really a very basic procedure. The only real trick to sugar and water is to get it to the right consistency, so when it dries, it's not too hot or cold. Once you get to that point, then you just paint it on her face".

Yeaggy says at first the procedure took two or three hours. "But the more we'd do it, the easier it would get, sometimes down to an hour and a half. Sometime she'd wear a pre-iced wig and sometimes we'd do it on her hair" he explains.

Actress Michelle Nicastro was a real trouper during seven days of wearing the makeup. "It wasn't fun but you get through it, it's all part of being an actress" she says.

"It was terribly uncomfortable. My face felt like Velcro when I touched it. The worst part was when they would paint it on and it would run down my scalp. I was physically in that freezer and I was fine until they closed the lid on me, then I kind of felt a little claustrophobic".

As for being dead ? "To be honest I had so much practice as it when I did Les Miserables for a year and a half. I died every night on stage and had to lay there for a while and look like I wasn't breathing. And you get scared that people are going to see you breathe, because you have to breathe. (I found that) you can breathe through your stomach, not your chest. This wasn't as hard, the camera is not on you that long".

Rest in peace.