Carlo Rambaldi

Italian artist whose greatest fame came with the technical creation of creatures in film making.

He attended the Technical Institute V. Monti in Ferrara, 1947 and the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, 1951. He won a number of painting and engraving prizes over the next three years. During this period he developed studies in which he regarded the body as a moving machine, from the bone structure to muscle dynamics, out of which comes movement and expression. He holds patents or copyrights which resolve the problems of animation of the human body, of quadrupeds and of winged animals.

In 1957 he moved to Rome. Encouraged by the friends in the film industry, he made a debut in the field of animation with "The Legend of Sigfrid," 1958. In the following years he worked with such noted film directors as Dino De Laurentiis, Joseph Mancievitz, Joseph Losey, Orson Welles, Paolo Pasolini, F. Fellini and Woody Allen on dozens of projects.

His American films include "King Kong," 1976, for which he won the Academy Award in March 1977 for creating Kong, "White Buffalo," 1976, where he created a mechanical walking and galloping buffalo, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," 1977, for his creation of mechanical extraterrestrials, "Night Wing," 1978, where he created electromechanical bats, "Alien," 1979, for the extraterrestrial monster for which he won the 1980 Academy Award for Special Effects. He worked on "The Hand," 1980, building a remote-control hand, on "Possession," 1980, creating four mechanical entities, and on Spielberg's "E.T. The Extraterrestrial," in 1981, building the electronic E.T.

On 24 November 1982, the California Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles had an exhibition of his technology and some of his film creatures.

Married; he and his wife Bruna have two sons, Alesandro who is an interior designer and Vittorio, a director and writer with Lorimar Studios in Italy.

He died in Lamezia Terme, Calabria, on 10 August 2012, age 86.