Les Bowie
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A composite shot of Dracula's castle in the 1958 Hammer horror film Dracula. The bottom half is Bernard Robinson's castle set, built on the Bray backlot; the top half, with turrets, mountains and sky, is a Les Bowie matte painting.
Les Bowie (1913 - 1979) was a Canadian-born special effects artist working mainly in Britain.
He frequently worked freelance on projects for relatively low-budget studios such as Hammer Films. His films for Hammer included The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), Dracula (1958) and The Kiss of the Vampire (1963). Notable non-Hammer films included The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) and Fahrenheit 451 (1966). He was also one of a team to win an Academy Award for his work on the 1978 film Superman, specialising in mattes and composites.
