Danny turned our makeup trailer into an oasis of order amid the chaos and oftentimes panic of the set. Well before my tardy clomp up the trailer steps, he would arrange his station, make coffee, tune in National Public Radio and sometimes put out a plate of breakfast delicacies.

My shaving tools would be at the ready -- a Norelco razor, a stick of roll-on talc, a disposable blade for the tough whiskers. And then, with a ritualistic slap of Sea Breeze on my face, I'd declare, "Shave, where be thy sting?" and off to work we'd go.

On both movies that were fun ("Catch Me if You Can") and movies that were tough ("Turner & Hooch" -- ridiculously tough), Danny juggled my mercurial attitudes and the condition of my skin, offering his ear for my complaints and altering my body chemistry when necessary with a new facial scrub, a homemade bran muffin or a glass of cabernet.

My makeup man and I worked around the world and at every studio in Hollywood. With my face as his canvas, he turned me into a cop, an astronaut, an Army Ranger, an F.B.I. agent, a Master of the Universe, a Slavic tourist and even Santa Claus.

Through a freezing Chicago winter on "Road to Perdition," he showed the violence of my character with a slightly broken nose and eyes framed by the harsh lines of my hat and mustache. "Cast Away" was all Danny and the hair stylist Kathy Blondell. As I lost weight to show four years of being marooned in the South Pacific, Danny created scars, sunburns, rashes, rotted teeth and seeping wounds. Hours before sunrise on the set in a Fijian paradise, I nodded back to sleep as Danny and his crew fought fatigue and the clock, deconstructing me in a frenzy equal to a Nascar pit crew getting a car back onto the track.

On "Forrest Gump," we worked a 27-day stretch without a day off, grabbing shots in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine before returning to South Carolina, all in one weekend. That's four states and three full-length beards in two days! Danny took me from a teenager to a Vietnam soldier to parenthood as Sally Field died of cancer, earning him and his team one of Gump's Academy Award nominations. Perhaps because few voters realized the makeup was there, he went home empty-handed.