[2] He attended the Wooster School in Danbury, Connecticut and Yale University, where he studied pre-med, with the intention of entering dentistry, although he majored in zoology.

[6] He was appointed as the first make-up director of WNBC (NBC's station in New York City), working there for fourteen years, often under producer David Susskind.

[5] Smith pioneered the development of prosthetic makeup, now better known as special make-up effects, from the basement of his home in Larchmont, New York, a district in which he lived through most of his life.

[6] For a television adaptation of The Moon and Sixpence (1959), Smith was required to turn Laurence Olivier into a leprosy victim: "When I finished the make-up, he looked in the mirror and said, 'Dick, it does the acting for me.'

"[6] Other early work by Smith was seen on Way Out (1961), a short-lived supernatural syndicated clone of Twilight Zone, produced by Susskind in New York City, and hosted by Roald Dahl.

In 1967, Smith provided special make-up for two episodes of the supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows; in the storyline, vampire Barnabas Collins (played by Jonathan Frid)[9] was undergoing medical treatment to change him into a living human being.

[n 1] "In the original book of Little Big Man, Dustin's character is 110," Smith observed, "but the director Arthur Penn just said out of the blue one day: 'Let's make him 121 instead'.

"[4] Smith also consulted Australian make-up artist Roy Ashton, having seen his work on the British horror film The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), in which Anton Diffring was made to appear of extreme old age.

[11] Smith had to use other methods, as an alternative to prosthetics, to create an aged Don Corleone in The Godfather (1972) because Marlon Brando was unwilling to have such appliances applied because of time considerations.

[6] Smith received a second Academy Award nomination for his work on Dad (1989), for which he was required to age Jack Lemmon, then in his mid-60s, into an octogenarian.