Dorka Nieradzik, who has died of cancer aged 68, was a makeup, hair and visual effects designer who cut her teeth on the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who before breaking into films, including Closer and Cold Comfort Farm.

In 1980 the visually ambitious Doctor Who story The Leisure Hive marked a major stylistic overhaul for the series, including new opening titles and music. Nieradzik, gaining her first credit on the show, was tasked with creating its striking gold- and green-skinned aliens, the Argolin, and what would be one of her proudest achievements: the ageing of the leading man, Tom Baker, by several hundred years using a mixture of makeup, prosthetics and hairpieces. Her work was perfectly complemented by the sumptuous costumes of June Hudson, a designer with whom she enjoyed many fruitful collaborations.

Her eight-year association with the series covered nine stories including Baker’s last, Logopolis (1981). She designed the Watcher, a ghostly, foetus-like creation that served as an intermediate stage in the memorable regeneration of Baker into his successor, Peter Davison. When creating a convincing frog-like alien makeup for Four to Doomsday (1982), she ensured that the illustrious actor beneath it – Stratford Johns – was both discernible and able to give a performance. For Revelation of the Daleks (1985) her gory imagery included the decaying remains of Arthur Stengos – a talking severed head with an exposed, pulsating muscle. She strayed from the scripted description of the Kandyman in The Happiness Patrol (1988) to devise a monstrously striking creature composed of oozing confectionery.

Born in Tarnowskie Góry in Poland, the homeland of her father, George Nieradzik, a bank manager, she relocated in early childhood with her family to Scotland, the birthplace of her mother, Alice (nee Blyth), an artist who worked at the Pringles knitwear factory as well as running a small shop. Dorka was brought up in Chirnside, Berwickshire, and educated at Berwickshire high school, where she remembered laughs of derision when she announced in class that she wanted to be a makeup artist for television. She enrolled at art college but, after completing her foundation year, left to study hairdressing in Newcastle for two years, all the while writing to the BBC to offer her services.

She initially found work in London as a dresser and then wardrobe assistant at the National Theatre, before becoming wardrobe mistress at the Young Vic, which involved working on the first UK production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat (1972). She was then, at last, offered a job as a makeup trainee at the BBC; she credited the non-competitive, creative and nurturing atmosphere she encountered there as a key ingredient of her subsequent success.

She enjoyed her comedy work for the corporation – particularly Last of the Summer Wine (1979-83), Yes Minister (1980), and French and Saunders (1988) – but her stint there covered a vast array of genres and included everything from Top of the Pops (1981) to Only Fools and Horses (1989) via the civil war drama By The Sword Divided (1983) and EastEnders (1986). She eventually went freelance and oversaw Dennis Potter’s final works for television, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus (1996), was nominated for a Bafta for Granada’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1998), and for a Royal Television Society award for Perfect Strangers (2001). Other small-screen credits include the TV films The Fix (1997) and A Rather English Marriage (1998) and several episodes of the popular drama Foyle’s War (2002-03).

Having first worked with the actor Clive Owen on Stephen Poliakoff’s Century (1993), she became his personal makeup and hair artist, working with him on films including Closer (2004), King Arthur (2004), Children of Men (2006), Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), Words and Pictures (2013) and, her final work, Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017).

She won a Bafta award for her makeup for Cold Comfort Farm (1995) and in 2000 the academy honoured her with a special award for her contribution to the industry. She won Royal Television Society awards for A Perfect Spy (1987) and Ashenden (1991) and was made MBE for services to drama in 2004.

She is survived by her father, her sister Anushia, and brother, David. A younger sister, Eva, predeceased her.

• Dorka Malgorzata Nieradzik, makeup, hair and visual effects designer, born 5 March 1949; died 12 February 2018