And I imagine most won't bother to read the obituaries. After all, in a year that has seen the passing of Richard Widmark, Paul Scofield, Charlton Heston, Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, what price a man who made movie monsters?

The simple fact is that Winston helped to revolutionise cinema as we know it. A trail-blazing artist, visionary and eternal schoolboy, he poured something akin to genius into fantasy cinema and helped facilitate a rebirth to a genre so often treated with scorn and derision.

Stan Winston built a company from scratch. Like Ray (Jason and the Argonauts) Harryhausen, he created home-made special effects in his garage and, through talent and childlike passion, went on to become one of the leading figures in prosthetic make-up and animatronic effects. He was an enthusiast, an aficionado and an inventor. He was a fan.

If his name is unfamiliar to the average cinemagoer, his creations are not. Winston won a quartet of Oscars for Aliens, Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. To the buffs who adore retro movies with a modern edge, he joined a pantheon of legendary monster-makers that includes Dick Smith, Rick Baker, Rob Bottin, Tom Savini, Greg Nicotero and Bob Keen.

Stan Winston gave life to dreams and nightmares. He made crazy ideas material. He interpreted thoughts and put them on a movie screen, larger-than-life.

"I don't do special effects. I do characters," he once said.

He took his inspiration from the classic creature features of yore: The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Boris Karloff's lumbering, flat-headed creature from Frankenstein. His repertory of creations included the huge T-Rex in Jurassic Park, the alien queen in Aliens, the shiny, malevolent exoskeleton terminators, Edward Scissorhands, Predator, and a talking robot teddy bear in Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence.

In recent years, illness forced Winston to take a back seat from much of the day-to-day operation of effects work. And the advancement of digital effects increasingly meant what was once ground-breaking could be recreated by computer.

Progress eventually put paid to the work of Ray Harryhausen, who said he no longer cared to be locked in a darkened room for hours on end. I have a sense that Winston knew the world was changing and that his glory days had passed, too. But he had fun while it lasted.

So spare a thought for the back-room boys when next you look in awe at a monster in a blockbuster. They are the ones who make cinema great.