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Acclaimed British movie make-up artist Stuart Freeborn—best known as the designer of Jedi Master Yoda for The Empire Strikes Back—has died at the age of 98.

Born in September 1914, Freeborn drew upon the face of Albert Einstein as well as his own reflection in creating the look for Yoda. Star Wars creator George Lucas wanted a face that suggested wisdom as well as the possibility of having been a great warrior.

Freeborn was largely self-taught, having begun his film career in the 1930s at Denham Studios under Alexander Korda in an attempt to escape having to work in his father’s insurance brokerage office.

“I never stopped from that moment,” he said, and went on to work on movie make-up for stars such as Alec Guinness (Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars), Peter Sellers, Marlene Dietrich and Vivien Leigh, among many others.

During the Second World War, Freeborn interrupted his career to train as a fighter pilot. Returning to the movie business, he worked on such classics as David Lean’s 1948 Oliver Twist (in which Guinness played Fagin). He worked again with Lean in Sri Lanka for 1957’s The Bridge on the River Kwai. Having survived the war, Asian flu and haemophilia, Freeborn was almost killed due to a car crash on location—his fellow passengers were not so lucky.

Freeborn went on to work with Stanley Kubrick on Doctor Strangelove (1964) and on the ‘dawn of man’ sequence for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, in which he used comedian Ronnie Corbett in make-up tests for the proto-humans, giving rise to a long-running urban legend that Corbett was in the film).

As well as Yoda, for the Star Wars movies Freeborn devised other creatures and characters including Chewbacca the Wookiee and Jabba the Hutt. Some of his creations are expected to be featured in the future Star Wars movies announced as part of the Disney purchase of Lucasfilm.

Freeborn’s son Graham followed him into the business, working with his father on Star Wars (1977) and Superman (1978). Nick Dudman, Freeborn’s assistant on The Empire Strikes Back and now a prolific make-up artist in his own right, described Stuart Freeborn as “…a Renaissance man capable of doing absolutely anything”.