VINCENT LEONARD PRICE JR: THE KING OF TERROR GENRE

Vicent Price

Halloween is coming and The Grandma is preparing this important event. Today, she has been buying some pumpkins, chesnuts and sweet wine to celebrate this amazing day. 

While she was buying these products, The Grandma was remembering one of her favourite actors, Vincent Price, the king of terror genre, an actor with an extensive career who is well-known by the young generations for his appearance in Michael Jackson's Thriller and who died on a day like today in 1993.

After going shopping, The Grandma has been also studying a new lesson of her First Certificate Language Practice manual (Vocabulary 21), in fact, the last lesson of this manual.

More information: Collocations I & II

Vincent Leonard Price Jr. (May 27, 1911-October 25, 1993) was an American actor, known for his 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. Born and raised near St. Louis, Missouri, Price also has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

Price was an art collector and consultant, with a degree in art history, lecturing and writing books on the subject. Additionally, he was the founder of the eponymous Vincent Price Art Museum in California. He was also a noted gourmet cook.

Vicent Price

Price was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest of the four children. 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 Provincetown Harbor. Price had some Welsh ancestry as well.

Price attended the St. Louis Country Day School, as well as Milford Academy in Milford, Connecticut. In 1933, he graduated with a degree in art history from Yale University, where he worked on the campus humor magazine The Yale Record. 

After teaching for a year, he entered the Courtauld Institute of Art in 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.

In 1936, Price appeared as Prince Albert in the American production of Laurence Housman's play Victoria Regina, which starred Helen Hayes in the title role of Queen Victoria.

More information: Biography

Price started out in films as a character actor. He made his film debut in Service de Luxe (1938) and established himself in the film Laura (1944), opposite Gene Tierney, directed by Otto Preminger. He played in the movie Brigham Young (1940), in Wilson (1944), and 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 best known, was in the Boris Karloff film Tower of London (1939). 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 horror-comedy spoof Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein released in 1948.

Vicent Price

Price reunited with Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven (1945) and Dragonwyck (1946). 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 in the biopic The Baron of Arizona (1950). He was active in radio, portraying the Robin Hood-inspired crime-fighter Simon Templar in The Saint, which ran from 1947 to 1951.

In the 1950s, Price moved into horror films, with a starring role in House of Wax (1953) as a homicidal sculptor, 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 well-loved thrillers by producer-director William Castle: House on Haunted Hill (1959) and The Tingler. He appeared 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.

More information: Eating Vincent Price

In the 1960s, Price achieved a number of low-budget filmmaking successes with American International Pictures (AIP) starting with the House of Usher (1960), 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 (1964).

He starred in The Last Man on Earth (1964), the first adaptation of the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend. 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.

Vicent Price

Price often spoke of his pleasure playing Egghead in the Batman television series.

During the early 1970s, Price hosted and starred in BBC Radio's horror and mystery series The Price of Fear. Price accepted a cameo part in the Canadian children's television program The Hilarious House of Frightenstein (1971) in Hamilton, Ontario, on the local television station CHCH. In addition to the opening and closing monologues, his role in the show was to recite poems about the show's various characters, sometimes wearing a cloak or other costumes.

He appeared in The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), its sequel Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972), and Theatre of Blood (1973), in which he portrayed one of a pair of serial killers. That same year Price appeared as himself in Mooch Goes to Hollywood. Price was an admirer of the works of Edgar Allan Poe and in 1975 visited the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, where he had his picture taken with the museum's popular stuffed raven.

More information: Ranker

Price recorded dramatic readings of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories and poems, which were collected together with readings by Basil Rathbone.

He starred for a year in the early 1970s in a syndicated daily radio program, Tales of the Unexplained. In October 1976, Price appeared as the featured guest in an episode of The Muppet Show.

In 1977, he began performing as Oscar Wilde in the one-man stage play Diversions and Delights. The play is set in a Parisian theatre on a night about one year before Wilde's death. The original tour of the play was a success in every city it played except for New York City. In the summer of 1979, Price performed the role of Wilde at the Tabor Opera House in Leadville, Colorado, on the same stage from which Wilde had spoken to miners about art some 96 years before. He would eventually perform the play worldwide.

Vicent Price

In 1982, Price provided the narrator's voice in Vincent, Tim Burton's six-minute film about a young boy who flashes from reality into a fantasy where he is Vincent Price.

That same year, Price performed a sinister monologue on the title track of Michael Jackson's Thriller album. A longer version of the rap, sans the music, along with some conversation can be heard on Jackson's 2001 remastered reissue of the Thriller album.

In 1983, Price played the British spoof horror film Bloodbath at the House of Death. He appeared in House of the Long Shadows, which teamed him with Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and John Carradine. Although Price had worked with each of the actors at least once in previous decades, this was the first time all had teamed up. One of his last major roles, and one of his favorites, was as the voice of Professor Ratigan in Walt Disney Pictures' The Great Mouse Detective in 1986.

More information: Legacy

From 1981 to 1989, 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 thirty-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 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).

In 1992, Price recorded the narration for Disneyland Paris's Phantom Manor, but the narration was shortly removed and replaced with an narration entirely in French by Gérard Chevalier. But they had left in Vincent Price's infamous laughter as a tribute to Price. However, in 2018, it was announced that during the renovation, they will be adding back Price's narration into the attraction.

More information: Yale News

It's as much fun to scare as to be scared.

Vincent Price