The Italian man who made E.T. come alive and turned mechanical creatures into movie stars is having a moment in Hollywood. A century after his birth and fourteen years after his death, special-effects artist Carlo Rambaldi received a star on the Walk of Fame, while an exhibition at the Italian Cultural Institute reveals another side of the three-time Oscar winner: his paintings and sculptures.

“If you can’t find a way, build it,” his granddaughter Cristina Lippolis Rambaldi recalled him saying, at the ceremony on Thursday morning. “I was lucky enough to spend my childhood in his workshop without knowing how famous he was,” she said. “My sisters and I drew, built things, tested mechanisms and played among the creatures hidden everywhere.”

Born in 1925 in Vigarano Mainarda, a small town near Ferrara in northern Italy, Rambaldi grew up with a passion for drawing, painting and building things with his hands, an interest that eventually led him to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. He began his career in Italian cinema in the 1950s, creating a mechanical dragon for Giacomo Gentilomo’s Sigfrido (1957), and went on to work with filmmakers such as Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Dario Argento.

His Hollywood breakthrough came in 1976, when Dino De Laurentiis hired him to create the giant gorilla for the remake of King Kong, a film the Italian artist had first seen as a child in his hometown cinema back in 1933. More than four decades later, he found himself bringing the creature to life, building an enormous mechanical gorilla operating through a complex system of hydraulics, as well as a life-size arm used for close-ups with Jessica Lange. The work earned him his first Oscar in 1977 and helped pave the way for a new generation of creatures on the big screen.

“Without Carlo Rambaldi’s King Kong, would there have been Stan Winston’s T-Rex in Jurassic Park? Probably not,” said Matt Winston, son of the legendary special-effects creator, at the ceremony.

His second Oscar came in 1980 for Ridley Scott’s Alien, for which he built the mechanical head of H.R. Giger’s terrifying creature. But it was his collaboration with Steven Spielberg that produced his most beloved creation, E.T., the little alien whose expressive eyes, face and movements made audiences forget they were watching a mechanical puppet.

“He was reserved, but he never said no to anyone asking for an autograph or a drawing,” Cristina recalled. “No matter how tired he was, he would sketch E.T. on any scrap of paper he could find. There must be napkins with E.T.’s face on them all over the world!”

His daughter Daniela, now President of the Carlo Rambaldi Foundation, recalls being personally involved in the creation of his most famous character: “He called me into his workshop to show me the first clay model and asked me what I thought. ‘Papà - I told him - he's a little ugly, but also kind of cute, because his bottom looks like Donald Duck's. He was delighted! ’'Okay, then I'm on the right track', he replied".

Alongside his unforgettable creations for the big screen, the man Spielberg called “E.T.’s Geppetto” never stopped imagining and painting cosmic landscapes and futuristic cities. Some of those canvases, along with his three golden Oscar statuettes, are now on display at the Italian Cultural Institute as part of Carlo Rambaldi: Dreaming the Cosmos, an exhibition curated by Cristina.