After emigrating to the United States from his native Greece as a teenager, Pierce tried his hand at several careers, including a stint as an amateur baseball player.

On the 1926 set of The Monkey Talks, Jack Pierce created the makeup for actor Jacques Lernier who was playing a simian with the ability to communicate.

So, where Henry Frankenstein has accessed the brain cavity, there is a scar and a seal, and the now famous "bolts" on the neck are actually electrodes: carriers for the electricity used to revive the stitched-up corpse.

They both cooperated on the design of the now iconic make-up, with Karloff removing a dental plate to create an indentation on one side of the Monster's face.

The Mummy, produced the following year, combines the plot of Dracula with the make-up tricks of Frankenstein, to turn Karloff into an incredibly aged and wrinkled Egyptian prince.

On November 20, 1957, Ralph Edwards got Jack Pierce reunited with a smiling Boris Karloff on the celebrity biography program This Is Your Life.

Karloff, the special guest of the night, was pleasantly surprised to see Jack Pierce once again, and called him the greatest make-up man in the business.

Lon's Wolf Man make-up partially consisted of yak hair being glued to his face, and having it singed with a hot iron.

Pierce used the established theatrical method of "laying" beards and mustaches, as did most artists who had risen through the theater and early silent movies.

Universal made 40 to 60 pictures a year, out of which only a half dozen might include some elaborate character make-up or monster face, and then usually sparingly.

More to the point, the new management at the studio, now called Universal International, wanted to upgrade the company image from B-pictures and programmers to prestige pictures.

Occasionally Jack Pierce would land a job on a major production such as Joan of Arc (1948) or the Danny Kaye version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, for which he made up Karloff as the Frankenstein Monster for a daydream sequence, cut from the film.

Notable Pierce creations during this period include the hirsute halfwit in Teenage Monster, played by 40-ish stuntman Gil Perkins, who had doubled Bela Lugosi in Pierce's Monster make-up in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man; Beyond the Time Barrier, with a clutch of bald, scarred atomic mutants and leading man Robert Clarke transforming into a withered ancient; Creation of the Humanoids, crafting a race of bald cyborgs with silver eyes via bald caps and scleral contact lenses; and a reprise of his Wolf Man design for Beauty and the Beast (1962), played by Mark Damon.

He created a great many historical, old age, and character make-ups in TV anthology series such as Screen Directors Playhouse, You Are There and Telephone Time.

One episode of that show, a drama called The Golden Junkman, featured Lon Chaney Jr. as an unlettered but kindly Armenian junk dealer who ages from his 30s to his 70s in the course of the story, which Pierce handled with aplomb.

His associate from the Universal days, director/producer Arthur Lubin, hired Pierce for what turned out to be his last employment, a steady four years on the Mister Ed television series, from 1961 to 1964.

Jack Pierce's work at Universal has become an influence to many in the entertainment field, including make-up artists Rick Baker and Tom Savini.