A Treasury of Great Recipes, 50th Anniversary Edition: Famous Specialties of the World's Foremost Restaurants Adapted for the American Kitchen (Calla Editions)
The Vincent Price Collection II [House on Haunted Hill, The Return of the Fly, The Comedy of Terrors, The Raven, The Last Man on Earth, Tomb of Ligeia & Dr. Phibes Rises Again) [Blu-ray]
Vincent Leonard Price Jr. was an American actor, well known for his distinctive voice and performances in horror films. His career spanned other genres, including film noir, drama, mystery, thriller, and comedy. He appeared on stage, television, radio, and more than one hundred films. He has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: one for motion pictures, and one for television.
Background
Price was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest of the four children of Vincent Leonard Price, Sr. (July 30, 1871 - June 18, 1948), president of the National Candy Company, and his wife Marguerite Cobb (née Wilcox) Price (October 28, 1874 - September 12, 1946). His grandfather, Vincent Clarence Price, invented "Dr. Price's Baking Powder", the first cream of tartar-based baking powder, and secured the family's fortune. Price was of English descent and was a descendant of Peregrine White, the first white child born in Colonial Massachusetts, being born on the Mayflower while it was in the harbor of Massachusetts. Price had some Welsh ancestry as well.
Education
Price attended St. Louis Country Day School. In 1933, he graduated with a degree in art history from Yale University, where he worked on the campus humor magazine The Yale Record.[8] After teaching for a year, he entered the University of London, intending to study for a master's degree in fine arts. Instead, he was drawn to the theater, first appearing on stage professionally in 1934. His acting career began in London in 1935, performing with Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre.
Career
Price started out in films as a character actor. He made his film debut in 1938 with Service de Luxe and established himself in the film Laura (1944), opposite Gene Tierney, directed by Otto Preminger. He played Joseph Smith in the movie Brigham Young (1940) and William Gibbs McAdoo in Wilson (1944) as well as Bernadette's prosecutor, Vital Dutour, in The Song of Bernadette (1943), and as a pretentious priest in The Keys of the Kingdom (1944).
His first venture into the horror genre, for which he became famous, was in the 1939 Boris Karloff film Tower of London. The following year Price portrayed the title character in The Invisible Man Returns (a role he reprised in a vocal cameo at the end of the 1948 horror-comedy spoof Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein).
In 1946, Price reunited with Tierney in two notable films, Dragonwyck and Leave Her to Heaven. There were also many villainous roles in film noir thrillers like The Web (1947), The Long Night (1947), Rogues' Regiment (1948) and The Bribe (1949), with Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner and Charles Laughton.
His first starring role was as conman James Addison Reavis in the 1950 biopic The Baron of Arizona. He also did a comedic turn as the tycoon Burnbridge Waters, co-starring with Ronald Colman in Champagne for Caesar, one of his favorite film roles. He was active in radio, portraying the Robin Hood-inspired crime-fighter Simon Templar in The Saint, which ran from 1947-51.
In the 1950s, Price moved into horror films, with a role in House of Wax (1953), the first 3-D film to land in the year's top ten at the North American box office. His next roles were The Mad Magician (1954), the monster movie The Fly (1958) and its sequel Return of the Fly (1959). That same year, he starred in a pair of beloved thrillers by producer-director William Castle: House on Haunted Hill (1959) as eccentric millionaire Fredrick Loren, and The Tingler as Dr. Warren Chapin, who discovered the titular creature. He also appeared to great effect in the radio drama "Three Skeleton Key," the story of an island lighthouse besieged by an army of rats. He first performed the work in 1950 on Escape and returned to it in 1956 and 1958 for Suspense.
In the 1960s, Price achieved a number of low-budget filmmaking successes with Roger Corman and American International Pictures (AIP) starting with the House of Usher (1960), which earned over $2 million at the box office in the United States and led to the subsequent Edgar Allan Poe adaptations of The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), The Comedy of Terrors (1963), The Raven (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), and The Tomb of Ligeia (1965).
He starred in The Last Man on Earth (1964), the first adaptation of the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend. In 1968 Price portrayed witchhunter Matthew Hopkins in Witchfinder General (released in the US as The Conqueror Worm). He starred in comedy films, notably Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965) and its sequel Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (1966). In 1968 he played the part of an eccentric artist in the musical Darling of the Day, opposite Patricia Routledge.
Price often spoke of his pleasure at playing Egghead in the Batman television series. One of his co-stars, Yvonne Craig (Batgirl), said Price was her favorite villain in the series. In an often-repeated anecdote from the set of Batman, Price, after a take was printed, started throwing eggs at series stars Adam West and Burt Ward, and when asked to stop, replied, "With a full artillery? Not a chance!", causing an egg fight to erupt on the soundstage. This incident is reenacted in the behind-the-scenes telefilm Return to the Batcave: The Misadventures of Adam and Burt. In the 1960s, he began his role as a guest on the game show Hollywood Squares, becoming a semi-regular in the 1970s, including being one of the guest panelists on the finale in 1980.
Price made guest star appearances in many shows of the decade, including Get Smart, F Troop, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. In 1964, he provided the narration for the Tombstone Historama in Tombstone, Arizona, which is still in operation as of 2016.
From 1981-89, Price hosted the PBS television series Mystery! In 1985, he provided voice talent on the Hanna-Barbera series The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo as the mysterious "Vincent Van Ghoul", who aided Scooby-Doo, Scrappy-Doo, and the gang in recapturing 13 evil demons. A lifelong rollercoaster fan, Price narrated a 1987 30-minute documentary on the history of rollercoasters and amusement parks including Coney Island. During this time (1985–1989), he appeared in horror-themed commercials for Tilex bathroom cleanser.
In 1984, Price appeared in Shelley Duvall's live-action series Faerie Tale Theatre as the Mirror in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", and the narrator for "The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About the Shivers". In 1987, he starred with Bette Davis, Lillian Gish, and Ann Sothern in The Whales of August, a story of two sisters living in Maine facing the end of their days. His performance in The Whales of August earned the only award nomination of his career: an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
In 1989, Price was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame. His last significant film work was as the inventor in Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands (1990).
Board Archives of American Art, Whitney Museum Friends of American Art.
Interests
Price, who studied Art History (along with English) at Yale, was a noted art lover and collector. He was a commissioner of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board. In 1957, impressed by the spirit of the students and the community's need for the opportunity to experience original art works first hand, Vincent and Mary Grant Price donated 90 pieces from their private collection and a large amount of money to establish the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park, California, which was the first "teaching art collection" owned by a community college in the United States. They ultimately donated some 2,000 pieces; the collection contains over 9,000 pieces and has been valued in excess of $5 million.
Price also spent time working as an art consultant for Sears-Roebuck: From 1962 to 1971, Sears offered the "Vincent Price Collection of Fine Art", selling about 50,000 fine art prints to the general public. Works which Price selected or commissioned for the collection included works by Rembrandt, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dalí. Public access to fine art was important to Price, who, according to his daughter, Victoria, saw the Sears deal as an "opportunity to put his populist beliefs into practice, to bring art to the American public."
Price himself amassed a large and extensive collection of art, and in 2008, a painting bought for $25 by a couple from Dallas, Texas was identified as a piece from Price's collection. Painted by leading Australian modernist Grace Cossington Smith it was given a modern valuation of AU$45,000.
Price was a noted gourmet cook and he authored several cookbooks with his second wife, Mary. These include:
A Treasury of Great Recipes (1965)
Mary and Vincent Price present a National Treasury of Cookery (1967)
Mary and Vincent Price's Come into the Kitchen Cook Book: A Collector's Treasury of America's Great Recipes (1969)
Cooking Price-Wise with Vincent Price (1971)
Mary and Vincent Price present a National Treasury of Cookery was a five-volume series, packaged in a boxed set and published by the Heirloom Publishing Company. These five books were combined into a single book two years later and published as Mary and Vincent Price's Come into the Kitchen Cook Book: A Collector's Treasury of America's Great Recipes. Most of the Prices' cook books were kept in print throughout the 1970's. After being out of print for several decades, two of Mary and Vincent's books have been reprinted; A Treasury of Great Recipes (in August 2015 by Calla Editions) and Mary and Vincent Price's Come into the Kitchen Cook Book (in November 2016 by Calla Editions), both featuring new forewords by their daughter Victoria Price. Cooking Price-Wise with Vincent Price is scheduled to be repressed by Dover Publishing in October 2017 under the updated title Cooking Price-Wise - The Original Foodie.
Connections
Price married three times. His first marriage was with former actress Edith Barrett, they had one son, Vincent Barrett Price. Price later married Mary Grant Price, and they had a daughter, Victoria Price, on April 27, 1962. She was named Victoria after Price's first major success in the play Victoria Regina. Price's last marriage was to Australian actress and Catholic convert Coral Browne, who appeared with him (as one of his victims) in Theatre of Blood (1973).
One example of his outspoken political action came when he concluded an episode of The Saint titled "Author of Murder," which aired on NBC Radio on July 30, 1950. He denounced racial and religious prejudice as a form of poison and claimed Americans must actively fight against it because racial and religious prejudice within the United States fuels support for the nation's enemies. Price was later appointed to the Indian Arts and Crafts Board under the Dwight D. Eisenhower Administration; he called the appointment "kind of a surprise, since I am a Democrat."
Price was supportive of his daughter, who came out as lesbian, and was critical of Anita Bryant's anti-gay campaign in the 1970s. He was an honorary board member of PFLAG and among the first celebrities to appear in public service announcements discussing AIDS with the public.