Mourning a creature creator

After several heart-breaking and high-profile losses in the creative community this year (Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella this spring alone), there's another today that makes this season even tougher.

Oscar winner Stan Winston, whose ground-breaking company created characters and effects for some 75 features, several music videos and tons of commercials, has died after a long battle with myeloma. He was 62.

He'd recently worked on "Iron Man," the top-grossing movie of the year, and had numerous projects in the works, including "G.I. Joe," "Avatar" and the next "Terminator."

Among his Oscar winning projects were "T2," "Aliens" and "Jurassic Park."

To us, and to many action and genre fans, his name was always the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for eye-popping special effects and makeup, the kind that transport you into that movie's world and yet speak to you in not-so-outrageous terms. In other words, you start to think that yeah, some of that stuff could actually happen. Couldn't it?

Read THR's obit of this class act here.