Okay, I confess. There are two main sources I use for these articles. For my sister-column Celebrating the Living, too. I mostly use IMDb and Wikipedia. Well, why not? I’m not going into any great detail. I’m writing five paragraphs, and it’s mostly about my connection with the person half the time anyway. Or one specific thing that’s the main reason I’m choosing to write about them at that time. I don’t need to do much in-depth research to write these. A little rough background is all I need. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as though there’s even that much about Milicent Patrick, who doesn’t even have an IMDb page.

It seems clear that she was born in El Paso, Texas, but sources have her birth year ranging from 1915 to 1930. She’s probably dead, with dates of death ranging from the ’70s to 1998. She was born Mildred Elizabeth Fulvia Di Rossi, daughter of architect and engineer Camille Charles Rossi; he was the creator of Hearst’s San Simeon, so you’d think it would be easier to track down when he had a daughter. Several of the article I found, including IMDb, credit her as a children’s book illustrator, but there’s no mention of which books she illustrated. She’s listed as being Disney’s first female animator, but there are no details on what she animated. She acted in twenty-one movies, and the only one for which she was credited was The Women of Pitcairn Island, where she played “Island Woman.”

And she may or may not have created the monster makeup for such diverse films as The Creature From the Black Lagoon and This Island Earth. But no one knows for sure. Makeup artist Bud Westmore also claimed credit for Gill-Man, and the likelihood is that it was a joint effort, with Westmoreland and Patrick both contributing to the finished design. But so did producer William Alland, who apparently thought of the Creature as being an Oscar with gills. In fact, interviews of the time include Patrick insisting that she was not the sole creative force behind the Creature’s appearance. Her contribution to other movies is not better documented.

The longest article I found had as much information about the plots of the movies she is believed to have contributed toward as Patrick herself. No one seems to know much of anything. She was married twice, but she also seems to have been in a relationship with minor actor George Tobias for forty years. She doesn’t seem to have had children. There is a claim that she was an Italian countess, but even that—again, something you’d think would be easy to look up—is uncertain.

Even if she didn’t design the Creature, she certainly had a hand in it, a hand in several aspects of movie design from the era. She influenced things, even if we can’t say how much or how little. And it is interesting to consider that the claims that she created the Creature tend to focus on the idea that a woman did the work and had her credit stolen, but articles at the time hyped the fact that such a beautiful woman could possibly create something like that, and wasn’t it crazy? Really, no one except Milicent Patrick herself comes across as looking all that great, here.