THE MASTER OF PROSTHETICS FAMOUSLY TURNED ROBERT DE NIRO INTO BOXER JAKE LAMOTTA FOR THE 1980 CLASSIC
By Colin Tait | June 17, 2025
When Robert De Niro won his second Academy Award – his first for Best Actor – in 1981 for Raging Bull, he stood before his peers not only as a singular performer but as the embodiment of a profound artistic collaboration. Among the first people he thanked was not a co-star, director or producer – but Michael Westmore, the makeup artist whose work helped De Niro realize one of the most radical physical and emotional transformations in film history.
Robert De Niro as boxer Jake LaMotta in 1980’s ‘Raging Bull.’ Acclaimed makeup artist Michael Westmore was responsible for transforming De Niro into the former middleweight champion.
De Niro’s commitment to becoming Jake LaMotta is the stuff of legend and acting lore. Not content to simulate the boxer’s physicality, he trained under LaMotta himself for more than a year, learning to move, punch and inhabit the ring with such authenticity that the former middleweight champion declared De Niro could have turned pro. “I’m not a fighter per se,” De Niro wrote on the front page of his shooting script, “but I have earned the right to play a fighter.”
That right came at a considerable cost. The production famously shut down for months so De Niro could gain over 60 pounds – “eating his way across Italy” – to portray LaMotta’s post-retirement decline. But the transformation was never just physical. De Niro had, quite literally, someone in his corner: Michael Westmore.
Westmore’s ‘Raging Bull’ shooting script includes detailed continuity notes and Polaroids of makeup designs for specific scenes and fight sequences.
A third-generation master of makeup and prosthetics, Westmore brought forensic precision to the project. He took facial casts from LaMotta and used them to design a library of prosthetics that charted the boxer’s evolving damage – from cauliflower ears and a broken nose to the deepening bruises of a man aging into his pain. For each fight, Westmore prepared appliances that could split, swell or spurt blood on cue. Between takes, he oiled De Niro’s skin to keep the prosthetics intact and ensured nothing slipped under the hot lights or from the actor’s sweat-drenched frame. Westmore’s work wasn’t just cosmetic; it was structural. He helped sculpt the performance.
During Heritage’s July 16-18 Hollywood/Entertainment Signature® Auction, Westmore opens his personal archive, a trove including four items that tell a uniquely detailed story of his collaboration with De Niro – testaments not merely to surface transformation, but to the shared authorship behind one of cinema’s most physically and psychologically demanding performances.
From Westmore’s personal collection comes this group of four lifecasts of De Niro’s face, each reflecting a distinct prosthetic effect used during different stages of the actor’s transformation into LaMotta.
In addition to the original molds Westmore used to fabricate the prosthetics worn by De Niro throughout the film, taken from a lifecast of LaMotta, the sale features four lifecasts of De Niro’s face, each demonstrating how different prosthetics – bruised brow, swollen cheek, split nose – created precise effects, some fitted with tubing to spurt blood at impact. The auction also offers Westmore’s annotated shooting script, filled with continuity notes that detail, scene by scene, the specific bruises, cuts and facial changes required for each sequence, as well as the video camera Westmore used to meticulously document De Niro’s changing looks – a tool of continuity, design refinement and performance tracking.
To encounter these objects is to grasp the extent to which performance in Raging Bull was not just acted but constructed – through grit, repetition, technical design and mutual trust. Having spent years researching De Niro’s process and archive, I found these objects to be uniquely illuminating. They are tactile proof of the painstaking precision behind what appears onscreen as improvisational and raw. From the anatomical molds to the video logs, these items show how cinema’s most ferocious moments are often the most carefully composed.
A pair of original plaster molds Westmore used to create nose and ear prosthetics for De Niro’s dramatic transformation in ‘Raging Bull’
Heritage offers these four extraordinary lots as part of a broader selection from the Michael Westmore Collection – an archive that spans the makeup artist’s career, from Rocky and Mask to Star Trek, Masters of the Universe and beyond. These pieces, however, document something rarer: the creative intimacy between actor and artisan, working together to build a performance that would change the grammar of screen acting.
In Raging Bull, violence becomes revelation. The transformation is not merely physical; it is metaphysical. These artifacts are not just memorabilia. They are material traces of a performance that stretched the limits of cinema, of the body and of the craft itself – reminders that behind every great actor is a network of collaborators, and sometimes, the most essential one is holding the mold.