Background
Bela Lugosi was born on 20 October 1882 in Lugos, Hungary.
Bela Lugosi was born on 20 October 1882 in Lugos, Hungary.
At the age of 12, Lugosi dropped out of school.
As Arisztid Olt, he made a few films in Hungary and a small part in Der Januskopf (20, F. W. Murnau). He came to America in 1921 with a touring theatrical company. Bv 1923 he had made a movie debut in The Silent Command (23, J. Gordon Edwards); The Rejected Woman (24, Albert Parker); and The Midnight Girl (25, Wilfred Nov). In 1927 he played Dracula in a Broadway adaptation of Brain Stoker’s novel. After Prisoners (29, William A. Seiter), The Thirteenth Chair (29, Tod Browning), Such Men Are Dangerous (30, Kenneth Hawks), Renegades (30, Victor Fleming), and Wild Company (30, Leo McCarey), Lugosi took the part intended originally for Lon Chaney in Dracula (31, Tod Browning).
He made very few “straight” films after that: Broad Minded (31, Mervyn Le Roy); Women of All Nations (31, Raoul Walsh), and later, Ninotchka (39, Ernst Lubitsch). For the rest of his career he was, with Karloff, the touchstone of frightening intentions: as Dr. Mirakle, scientist kidnapper, in Murders in the Rue Morgue (32, Robert Florey); as Chandu the Magician (32, William Cameron Menzies and Marcel Vamel); as Murder Legendre in White Zombie (32, Victor Halperin); The Death Kiss (32, Edwin L. Marin); as a mutant in Island of Lost Souls (33, Erie C. Kenton); Night of Terror (33, Benjamin Stoloff); Dr. Vitus Verdegast, skinning Karloff alive in The Black Cat (34, Edgar G. Ulmer); Gift of Gab (34, Karl Freund); as the vampire in The Mark of the Vampire (35, Browning); The Raven (35, Lew-Landers); The Invisible Ray (36, Lambert Hillyer); Dracula’s Daughter (36, Hillyer); as Ygor, charming the monster with a mournful pipe tune, in The Son of Frankenstein (39, Rowland V. Lee); Dark Eyes of London (39, Walter Summers); The Gorilla (39, Allan Dwan); the remade The Black Cat (41, Albert S. Rogell); The Wolf Man (41, George Waggner); The Ghost of Frankenstein (42, Kenton); Return of the Vampire (43, Landers); Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (43, Roy William Neill); The Body Snatcher (45, Robert Wise); Zombies on Broadway (45, Gordon Douglas); Devil Bat's Daughter (46, Frank Wisbar); Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (48, Charles Barton); Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (52); and The Black Sleep (56, Reginald le Borg). Death may have come mercifully, for Lugosi died a year after having been admitted to a hospital for drug addiction.
He died as he was filmino; Plan 9 From Outer Space (59, Edward D. Wood, Jr.), the perfect memorial for the undead.
While everyone knew that the Boris Karloff who played Frankenstein’s monster was an upright Englishman, amused by the genre, Lugosi was a captive of horror. Small, dark, and severe in features, his acting was so florid and vet so macabre that only some fanciful notion of Hungarian mythology could explain it. He could be frighten-ing in a way that other actors in horror never achieved: because he appeared to believe in the literal meaning of the films, and because it was possible to be persuaded that he was himself possessed. “I am Dracula”—his first words, were less introduction than assertion. While later in Dracula there is a moment when Lugosi’s daringly slow deliverv admits to his philosophy: "To die, to be really dead, that might be glorious. ”
There is the man tortured by half-life. His Dracula was an original that the cinema never attempted to match: after Lugosi, the Count became tall and handsome, as likelv to kiss as bite. Yet Lugosi's pinched lips and his skullcap of hair were as black as congealed blood and his pallor was that of imminent extinction. Just as Peter Lorre, another Hungarian, became trapped by Hollvwood in squalid spoofs of his earliest successes, so Lugosi lived on, tormented by the Ritz brothers, Abbott and Costello, and Old Mother Riley. The dross never affected his place in the history of cinema: for when the bell tolls and the door creaks, Lugosi is the one to be feared. So dire an actor smacks of authenticity in the horror game.