Top Tinseltown stars who turned to him in their quest for physical perfection, pioneering plastic surgeon Ivo Pitanguy was an artist.
He made the human form his canvas as he became known as the Michelangelo of the scalpel, the Renoir of rhinoplasty and the Botticelli of breast surgery.
Watching him perform, one trainee said it was like “a visit to the Louvre”.
And Elizabeth Taylor , Sophia Loren, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Brigitte Bardot are thought to have been among Brazilian Pitanguy’s finest masterpieces.
He died at the weekend, aged 90, from a heart attack, only a day after carrying the Olympic torch on its way to Rio’s stadium for the opening ceremony.
In his home nation, he was known simply as “Maestro”, hero worshipped for his invention of the “Brazilian butt lift”, invisible face lifts and every kind of cosmetic tweak in between.
Twelve per cent of the 20 million cosmetic surgery operations carried out each year happen in Brazil – a figure that includes 50,000 plumped bottoms.
“I dedicated my life to beauty,” said Pitanguy, who is also believed to have helped former French president François Mitterand, JFK’s widow Jackie Onassis and even Ol’ Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra .
Marilyn Monroe sent Pitanguy a telling photo signed: “With Esteem.”
Although always discreet about his famous clientele, a who’s who of Hollywood frequented his private jet and chilled on his private island.
Tom Cruise and Ivana Trump were spotted there, although Pitanguy said he was teaching the latter samba.
He launched his career in the 1960s and had amassed a reported £19million fortune by the 1980s.
He was known to order in a lobster dinner as he gave mass surgery demonstrations to groups of his 586 protegees, but was not solely motivated by wealth.
Pitanguy was a philanthropist, who firmly believed the poor deserved “a right to beauty” too.
A butt lift was not just a frivolity, he would argue, but was sometimes essential to happiness.
A surgeon was “a psychologist with a scalpel in his hand”.
Every week, he offered free cosmetic surgery to everyone from slum dwellers to tribal leaders, arguing surgeons were “artists of the living form, dealing with body and soul”.
Pitanguy insisted that one day “it will be clear that aesthetic surgery brings the desired serenity to those that suffer by being betrayed by nature”.
It was treating the poor and needy that launched Pitanguy’s career.
Born in 1926, in Brazil’s mountainous area of Minas Gerais, he was the son of a surgeon.
He may have passed out the first time he saw an operation, but at 15 he lied about his age to enrol in medical school.
He later became head of the burns and reconstructive surgery unit in Rio’s Souza Aguair Hospital .
In 1961, after an arsonist started a fire at a circus, 2,500 people were trapped in the big top and 400 died. Hundreds suffered debilitating burns.
Pitanguy took charge. He said: “For three days and three nights, we operated, grafted, nursed and prayed.”
When a man, seeing the livid scars across his face, announced, “I’d rather be dead”, Pitanguy, who is thought to have helped F1 driver Niki Lauda recover from burns after a crash in 1976, realised just how important looks can be.
He said: “At that moment I realised it was not enough to repair.”
He founded Rio’s first plastic surgery unit, where his first clients included a pickpocket whose hand had been sliced off by an angry victim.
But it was for his wealthy clients, glamorous lifestyle and showmanship that he became renowned.
By the 1970s he had made Rio a mecca for “body sculpting”.
And throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he was regularly spotted in the society pages partying with the “beautiful people”.
Reports said he let celebrity clients recuperate on his mile-long island, Ilha dos Porcos Grande (the Isle of Big Pigs), off Rio.
He said: “I always become friends with my patients. It is important to have a good interaction.”
As he grew as wealthy as his clients, he commuted by helicopter to his hospital flanked by armed guards.
He also owned a flat in Paris, and a chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland, and was to be found at parties thrown by jet-setters such as Mick Jagger , Margaux Hemingway and Salvador Dali, whose masterpieces hung on his walls beside those of Matisse, Picasso and Chagall.
Married for 50 years to Marilu, with four children, he had a black belt in karate, competed in tennis and swimming championships, and read for up to two hours a night.
An animal lover – as a boy he walked the streets with a boa constrictor round his neck – he set up a wildlife sanctuary sheltering 800 creatures on his island.
Pitanguy said more than four hours’ sleep left him “tired”, and was renowned for the speed at which he worked, often performing four operations a day, and seeing 60 clients each week.
He once explained his philosophy on cosmetic surgery, saying: “An individual’s suffering is not proportional to his deformity, but to the perturbation caused to his harmony by living with his image.” He, himself, never succumbed.
He said: “The most important thing is to have a good ego and then you don’t need an operation.”