The color of plague, what did it look like? He could spend days with such questions, says Marcel De Roovere about his father Jules. For a make-up artist on a film about the plague, that was also an essential and practical issue, because what face color do you give someone who had that disease?
Everything had to be right, that was one of the pillars of his craftsmanship. Because for Jules De Roovere, Belgian by descent and born in 1932 in Utrecht, make-up was a profession, and he was a craftsman in heart and soul. ‘What do you know about facial anatomy?’ was one of the first questions from his teacher Herman Michels, who in the 1950s was the big man in the make-up rooms and wig studios of Dutch theaters.
Speaking and lively
‘Read those books about anatomy’, De Roovere also urged his students, including his assistant Arjen van der Grijn, who later gave faces to the types of Van Kooten and De Bie. Van der Grijn studied Rembrandt’s portraits with De Roovere’s eye, and translated the heads into planes, shadows and holes. ‘Jules could play wonderfully with the light planes on a face, making it expressive and lively. If you do it wrong, you can also paint it to death.’
As a make-up artist you had to be an all-rounder in the early 1960s – in the theater, but certainly on the first film sets. ‘We had to invent everything ourselves, because there was nothing. You experimented a long way’, says De Roovere himself in the book The Pioneers by Annemieke Hendriks about the pioneers of Dutch cinema. ‘For Carré, you paint in the middle of the room, because you see everything in the front row and nothing in the last row,’ says Van der Grijn. But for the film, everything had to be as natural as possible. ‘In Fanfare by Bert Haanstra he was really ahead of his time. Jules was a master at daring to omit.’
Always standby
Film or theatre, De Roovere did it with dedication and dedication. Carry Tefsen as ghost in Anatevka, the first musical in the Netherlands in 1966, and Lex Goudsmit as Tevje. Not once, but six hundred times, or however many times the performance was played. Long before the actors came, he was there to clean and style the wigs.
After the performance was over, he stayed to clean up. And during the performance or on set, he was always on standby to secure a loose lock of hair, powder a shiny face or help shivering actors get over their stage fright. ‘You are the guardian of the head’, that’s what he called it. Of what’s on it and what’s in it.
He hated that, saying yes and doing no. Then you could leave immediately. But he also stood up for you. As a trade unionist and head of the NOB’s hairdressing and make-up department, he fought for recognition of the make-up profession and the working conditions of his people.
paterfamilias
In addition, he was a great sociable animal and a paterfamilias to his crew. After the performances, a standard Belgian beer was drunk in Amsterdam theater bars such as Oosterling and Hans en Grietje. And when it was fun, he also played a song on the piano, because one day he had wanted to be a musician.
The fact that there was little time for a regular family life as a result certainly cost him his first marriage, says son Marcel. He has drawn his conclusions from this: he shared joys and sorrows with his partner Eveline Poortvliet for over forty years. To Marcel, he was a largely absent father. But one that when it was holidays, drove to Yugoslavia with him and assistant Van der Grijn in an old duck. Then in the morning they called ‘union fait la force!‘ and they drove off singing.
Jules De Roovere died on 14 April in his hometown of Amsterdam.