Michael R. Thomas, born in Rahway, New Jersey, was raised in the Bronx and then in Hazlet, New Jersey, where he taught himself how to apply makeup for school plays. At around 18 years of age, he began working as a go-fer at New York film studios and as a Metropolitan Opera makeup apprentice. He made his on-camera TV debut on "Disc-O-Teen," a live dance show of the mid-1960s; Thomas became a dancing regular, dressed as Frankenstein. In the 1970s he got a makeup job on TV's Saturday Night Live (1975) where, among countless other gigs during his 20 seasons there, he collaborated on creating the look of the Coneheads. Film-wise he was makeup department head on the Ghostbusters movies and applied Michael Jackson's scarecrow makeup for The Wiz (1978). His wife was makeup artist Christine Domaniecki, whom he met on the set of "Disc-O-Teen," lost touch with, then re-encountered and fell in love with, 23 years later. Thomas' love of the Universal horror movies of the 1930s and '40s prompted him to make himself up to look like Bela Lugosi's Dracula and Ygor and appear at horror movie-themed fan conventions throughout the country.