Episode 33: We speak with Hair Designer Gail Ryan, Gail is responsible for all those wonderfully creative hairstyles in the film…. How the Grinch stole Christmas, her work along with Rick Baker’s won them the Oscar, Gail chats about coming up in the industry at a time when studios had apprenticeship programs and how valuable that training was, how much fun it was to work on variety shows and how she found herself working on the Donnie and Marie show!

GAIL RYAN

In 1970 Gail Ryan started working at NBC. Gail worked on or ran shows liked “Laugh-in”, “The Dean Martin Show”,
“The Andy Williams Show” and many others.
In 1974 Gail became the Head of the Hair Department for ABC. In 1977 she left ABC to become the department head for “The Donny and Marie Show“. Gail also ran the hair department for many specials for Disney, Bob Hope, Barbara Eden, Diana Ross, The Oscars, The Emmys and many more.
In 1985, Gail started to do feature films, she was lucky enough to work with many great actors like Benicio del Toro, Leslie Neilson, Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Demi Moore, Stocker Channing, Annette Bening, Albert Brooks, and Dustin Hoffman.
In 2000, Gail won an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Saturn Award, and a Guild Award for her work on “The Grinch That Stole Christmas”. In 2014, Gail was given the Lifetime Achievement award from the Make-up and Hair Guild.
At the present time, Gail is working on “Dancing with The Stars”, and she is still the Head of the Hair Departments for “The AMA Awards”, “Rocking New Years Eve”, “The Golden Globes”, and “The Sag Awards”. Gail started doing all of these shows when she was at ABC in 1974.
“Oh Yes,” she also did Ronald McDonald’s hair for 35 yrs.
Gail still loves being in this business and doing hair as much she did the first day she worked at NBC.

To see other projects Gail has worked on visit:  IMDB