Hungarian-American actor (1882-1956). He was born Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó, the youngest of four kids, in a town called Lugos (which he would eventually use as part of his stage name). He dropped out of school at age 12 and left home to take on a number of manual labor jobs and began his acting career in his early 20s, playing small roles in plays and operettas in various provincial theaters in 1903. He moved to Budapest in 1911 and played more small roles in the National Theatre of Hungary.
He served in the Austro-Hungarian Army Imperial and Royal 43rd Infantry Regiment as an infantry officer in World War I from 1914 to 1916. He was wounded on the Russian front and was awarded Hungary's Wound Medal. After the war, he acted in silent films, often under the stage name of Arisztid Olt.
Lugosi married Ilona Szmik in June 1917. During the Hungarian revolution in 1919, Lugosi fled the country because his labor activism and participation in the Hungarian Soviet Republic made it likely he'd be executed. He and Ilona fled to Vienna and then Berlin. But during the moves, Ilona lost their unborn child -- and honestly, she just didn't want to move so far away from her parents. She moved back to Hungary and filed for divorce; Lugosi did not contest it.
After a short period of working in German silent films, Lugosi got a job as a crewman on a merchant ship and traveled to the United States, starting out in New Orleans but soon moving to New York City, where he worked as a stage actor and director. He helped form a stock company that toured the East Coast, performing Hungarian language plays. He also performed in some English language plays, including "The Red Poppy," "The Devil in Cheese," and "Arabesque." He got married again in 1921 to Ilona von Montagh, a Hungarian actress who he'd worked with years before in Europe, but they didn't live together long and finally got divorced in 1925. During that period, Lugosi worked in silent films in New York.
In 1927, Lugosi starred in a Broadway production of "Dracula," a stage play based on Bram Stoker's novel and adapted by Hamilton Dean and John L. Balderston. The play was a gigantic success and toured the country through 1928. Lugosi married again in July 1929, tying the knot with Beatrice Woodruff Weeks, a wealthy widow. The marriage was, as they say, tempestuous and short-lived. Weeks filed for divorce in November 1929, accusing Lugosi of having an affair with Clara Bow, of trying to steal her checkbook and safe deposit box key, and of slapping her because she ate a pork chop he'd hidden in the refrigerator. Lugosi said Weeks drank too much and danced with other men. (Weeks died of alcoholism in Panama about 18 months after the divorce was finalized.)
Lugosi decided to remain in California after the tour was complete. He performed in a couple silent films in Hollywood and decided to return to the stage for a West Coast tour of "Dracula" in 1929. He performed in a few early talkies while lobbying Hollywood to make a film adaptation of "Dracula." When Universal Pictures finally decided to make the picture, Lugosi wasn't even their first choice. They initially wanted Conrad Veidt, John Carradine, Paul Muni, and others. And when they finally got around to offering him the role, he accepted too quickly, agreeing to a salary of just $3,500.
"Dracula" was released in 1931, and both the film and Lugosi's performance were tremendous triumphs. Lugosi is mesmerizing in the role, even when he's just staring into the camera. He whips from a courtly, charming Old World aristocrat to a feral demon in the space of seconds, and his voice, accent, and hypnotic eyes command the attention of audiences. (It's long been said that he learned his lines here phonetically as he couldn't speak English. This is bullshit -- he'd been living in the U.S. and performing in English since the early 1920s) Audiences in the '30s found him horrifying -- but his performance and his accent were also very easy to spoof. Doing the role with minimal makeup and with his natural thick accent meant that audiences found it too easy to associate him with horror roles. And he definitely didn't want to do only horror. He auditioned for many roles in historical dramas and lost out to other actors in most of them.
The parts he got were horror roles, and some of them were good, and some of them weren't. He was in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "White Zombie," "The Black Cat," "The Raven," "The Invisible Ray," "Son of Frankenstein," "Black Friday," and plenty more. But no matter the quality, they still meant he was getting completely typecast. And he was in a lot of movies with fellow horror icon Boris Karloff, occasionally as the hero, usually as the villain, but never with his name above Karloff's in the credits. Did this rankle him? It probably did, but reports are contradictory as to whether Lugosi and Karloff had a good relationship or not.
The typecasting wasn't improved by Lugosi's addiction to painkillers either. He had developed severe sciatica after his military service, and his doctors treated him with opiates, morphine, and methadone, which he quickly got addicted to.
Lugosi was still turning in top-notch work at this point in his life. He played Ygor, the evil blacksmith with a broken neck, in "Son of Frankenstein" in 1935, opposite Karloff as Frankenstein's Monster and John Carradine as Baron Wolf von Frankenstein, and is generally considered to have turned in the best performance in the whole movie. He was also in 1939's classic "Ninotchka" in a small but important character role as the no-nonsense Commissar Razinin. Much later, in 1948, he played Dracula for only the second time in "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein," a much better movie than the title would suggest. But considering the typecasting, considering the drug addiction, considering his reliance on strict script memorization and difficulties with television performances, the good parts in the good movies were few and far between.
Lugosi got married again in 1933 to Lillian Arch, 30 years younger than Bela, the daughter of Hungarian immigrants. Her father didn't approve of the marriage because Lugosi didn't have much money at the time. But he and Lillian stayed together for 20 years. The marriage also produced Lugosi's only offspring, Bela G. Lugosi, in 1938. The couple eventually divorced in 1953, partly because of Lugosi's drinking, partly because he got jealous that his wife took a job as assistant to actor Brian Donlevy. (Lillian married Donlevy about a decade after Bela's death.)
By the 1950s, Lugosi got few acting roles, and he was generally living near the poverty line. It was around this time that he met director Ed Wood, a guy with big dreams of making it big in the cinema but whose skills as a director were much, much more modest. Wood wasn't really the worst director of all time, but he wasn't great, and one of his true talents was attracting actors who wanted to make movies for not much money. And Lugosi really, really wanted to act. Yes, he needed money, but he also just wanted to act. So Wood put him in some movies. Lugosi was the narrator in "Glen or Glenda" in 1953, and he played a mad scientist in "Bride of the Monster" in 1955. Lugosi decided he wanted to check himself into a hospital to get treatment for his drug addictions while "Bride of the Monster" was in post-production, and Wood set up the movie's premiere as a fundraiser for Lugosi's expenses. The fundraiser raised very few funds, but Frank Sinatra managed to hear about Lugosi's troubles and visited him in the hospital to give him a $1,000 check. (Lugosi and Sinatra had never met before.)
After he was released from the hospital, Lugosi and Wood shot some test footage. This wasn't for any particular project or storyline, though Wood had a few irons in the fire for movies he wanted to make. Lugosi wore his Dracula cape while footage was shot in front of Lugosi's apartment, in front of actor Tor Johnson's home, and at a suburban cemetery. Lugosi made one movie after his release from the hospital -- 1955's "The Black Sleep" was yet another low-quality horror film, though it also managed to ensnare John Carradine, Basil Rathbone, Lon Chaney, Jr., and Tor Johnson. Lugosi was cast as a mute servant -- he'd expected to have a few lines, but the director left his dialogue on the cutting room floor.
Lugosi's fifth and final marriage came in 1955 to Hope Lininger, a horror fan half his age. She'd sent him letters while he was in the hospital, signing her notes "A dash of Hope."
And then Lugosi died of a heart attack on August 16, 1956, at the age of 73. But his acting career was as undead as his most famous horror role. Ed Wood remembered the test footage he'd shot with Lugosi the year before and used it for a new project called "Plan 9 from Outer Space." There wasn't enough test footage to use for a full movie, so Wood hired his wife's chiropractor, Tom Mason, to double for Lugosi in additional footage. Mason was taller and thinner than Lugosi, and he looked absolutely nothing like him, so he held a cape in front of his face any time he was on camera.
Lugosi was buried in full Dracula costume, including one of his capes. The funeral was well attended -- his fourth wife, Lillian, attended and paid for his plot and headstone. Ed Wood was a pallbearer. Tor Johnson was also in attendance, as was horror/sci-fi superfan Forrest J. Ackerman. Contrary to Hollywood legend, Peter Lorre wasn't in attendance and didn't joke about driving a stake through his heart.
horrorquest