H. R. Giger

In 1975, his nine-year romance with actress and muse Li Tobler ended with her sudden suicide.

Married in 1979, Giger and first wife Mia Bonzanigo divorced only a year and a half later.

His second wife, Carmen Maria Scheifele Giger, and he wed in 2006.

Hans Rudolf "Ruedi" Giger, eventually known as H.R., was born Feb. 5, 1940, in Chur, Graubünden, Switzerland, as the second child to Melly Giger-Meier and Hans Richard Giger.

He and his sister, Iris, who was seven years his senior, were treated kindly by their parents. The family lived in a modest, somewhat dingy apartment above the pharmacy where his father, a chemist, worked.

His first exposure to the art world, pictures of Cocteau’s film, 'Beauty and the Beast', came in 1944 through magazines from American soldiers who, while recuperating from skiing injuries, rested in his home.

In 1946, he began school, first attending the ‘Catholic Marienheim’, but soon transferring to ‘Auntie Grittli’s Reform(ational) Kindergarten’.

He first encountered death when his father received a skull as a promotional gift, which Giger immediately claimed as his plaything.

Giger worked full-time as an office furniture designer for Andreas Christen from 1966 until 1968, producing some ink drawings, oil paintings and his first polyester sculptures in his spare time.

In 1968, he quit his job to devote all of his time to creating art, including a commission to create movie props, which included designing his first extraterrestrial being.

Switzerland's first poster printing company printed, with world-wide distribution, his first collection of posters in 1969, the same year of the first exhibitions of his work outside of Zurich.

Rock band ‘Emerson, Lake and Palmer’ commissioned him to create the cover of the 1973 album 'Brain Salad Surgery’.

In the 1970s, he began using an airbrush, becoming known as the world's leading airbrush artist, and developed his signature style of meticulously rendered, otherworldly visions of the macabre, depicted in murky grays and blacks.

The most well-known collection of his work, 1977's book, 'Necronomicon,' included the lithograph of a biomechanoid, 'Necronom IV,' which grabbed the attention of Ridley Scott and became the basis for the Xenomorph creature in 'Alien.'

The designs created for the title creature, all stages of its lifecycle, spacecraft and extraterrestrial environments in the 1979 film 'Alien' not only catapulted Giger into fame but transformed the science fiction movie genre.