BELA LUGOSI, THE HUNGARIAN KING OF HORROR FILMS

Bela Lugosi

It's raining. August is a rainy month in its second fortnight in Barcelona. Some local festivities start in the big city and they are always accompanied by rain and storms. Neighbours work very hard to decorate their streets and create a nice and amazing environment but rain appears to destroy these creations every year.

The Grandma has decided to stay at home watching terror films. She loves them and she thinks that a grey and rainy day is a fantastic moment to enjoy this genre of cinema. She has chosen Bela Lugosi's films to remember this amazing Hungarian actor who died on a day like today in 1956.

Before watching Lugosi's films, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course.

Chapter 12. Graphics (V) (Spanish Version)

Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó (20 October 1882-16 August 1956), better known as Bela Lugosi was a Hungarian-American actor best remembered for portraying Count Dracula in the 1931 film and for his roles in other horror films.

After playing small parts on the stage in his native Hungary, Lugosi gained his first role in a film in 1917. He had to leave the country after the failed Hungarian Communist Revolution of 1919 because of his socialist activism. He acted in several films in Weimar Germany before arriving in the United States as a seaman on a merchant ship.

In 1927, he appeared as Count Dracula in a Broadway adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel. He later appeared in the 1931 film Dracula directed by Tod Browning and produced by Universal Pictures. Through the 1930s, he occupied an important niche in horror films, with their East European setting, but his Hungarian accent limited his potential casting, and he unsuccessfully tried to avoid typecasting.

Bela Lugosi in The Black Cat, 1934

Meanwhile, he was often paired with Boris Karloff, who was able to demand top billing. To his frustration, Lugosi, a charter member of the American Screen Actors Guild, was increasingly restricted to minor parts, kept employed by the studio principally so that they could put his name on the posters.

Among his pairings with Karloff, he performed major roles only in The Black Cat (1934), The Raven (1935), and Son of Frankenstein (1939); even in The Raven, Karloff received top billing despite Lugosi performing the lead role.

By this time, Lugosi had been receiving regular medication for sciatic neuritis, and he became addicted to morphine and methadone. This drug dependence was known to producers, and the offers eventually dwindled to a few parts in Ed Wood's low-budget films—including a brief appearance in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959).

More information: Bela Lugosi

Lugosi, the youngest of four children, was born Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó in Lugos, Kingdom of Hungary, now Lugoj, Romania, to Hungarian father István Blaskó, a banker, and Serbian-born mother Paula de Vojnich. He later based his last name on his hometown. He and his sister Vilma were raised in a Roman Catholic family.

At the age of 12, Lugosi dropped out of school. He began his acting career in 1901 or 1902. His earliest known performances are from provincial theatres in the 1903–04 season, playing small roles in several plays and operettas. He went on to perform in Shakespeare's plays. After moving to Budapest in 1911, he played dozens of roles with the National Theatre of Hungary between 1913–19. Although Lugosi would later claim that he became the leading actor of Hungary's Royal National Theatre, almost all his roles there were small or supporting parts.

During World War I, he served as an infantryman in the Austro-Hungarian Army from 1914–16, rising to the rank of Lieutenant. He was awarded the Wound Medal for wounds he suffered while serving on the Russian front.

Due to his activism in the actors' union in Hungary during the revolution of 1919, he was forced to flee his homeland. He went first to Vienna before settling in Berlin, in the Langestrasse, where he continued acting. He took the name Lugosi in 1903 to honor his birthplace, and eventually travelled to New Orleans, Louisiana as a crewman aboard a merchant ship.

Bela Lugosi in Count Dracula, 1931

Lugosi's first film appearance was in the movie Az ezredes (The Colonel, 1917). When appearing in Hungarian silent films, he used the stage name Arisztid Olt.

Lugosi made 12 films in Hungary between 1917 and 1918 before leaving for Germany. Following the collapse of Béla Kun's Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, leftists and trade unionists became vulnerable. 

Lugosi was proscribed from acting due to his participation in the formation of an actors' union. Exiled in Weimar-era Germany, he began appearing in a small number of well-received films, among them adaptations of the Karl May novels On the Brink of Paradise (Auf den Trümmern des Paradieses, 1920) and Caravan of Death (Die Todeskarawane, also 1920) with Dora Gerson (Gerson, who was Jewish, died in Auschwitz).

Lugosi left Germany in October 1920, intending to emigrate to the United States, and entered the country at New Orleans in December 1920. He made his way to New York and was inspected by immigration officers at Ellis Island in March 1921. He declared his intention to become a US citizen in 1928; on June 26, 1931, he was naturalized.

On his arrival in America, 1.85 m and 82 kg, Lugosi worked for some time as a laborer, and then entered the theater in New York City's Hungarian immigrant colony. With fellow expatriate Hungarian actors he formed a small stock company that toured Eastern cities, playing for immigrant audiences. Lugosi acted in several Hungarian plays before breaking out into his first English Broadway play, The Red Poppy, in 1922. Three more parts came in 1925–26, including a five-month run in the comedy-fantasy The Devil in the Cheese.

More information: Mental Floss

In 1925, he appeared as an Arab Sheik in Arabesque which premiered in Buffalo, New York at the Teck Theatre before moving to Broadway. His first American film role was in the melodrama The Silent Command (1923). Several more silent roles followed, villains and continental types, all in productions made in the New York area.

Lugosi was approached in the summer of 1927 to star in a Broadway theatre production of Dracula, which had been adapted by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel. The Horace Liveright production was successful, running for 261 performances before touring the United States to much fanfare and critical acclaim throughout 1928 and 1929.

In 1928, Lugosi decided to stay in California when the play ended its West Coast run. His performance had piqued the interest of Fox Film, and he was cast in the studio's silent film The Veiled Woman (1929). He also appeared in the film Prisoners (1929), believed lost, which was released in both silent and talkie versions.

In 1929, with no other film roles in sight, he returned to the stage as Dracula for a short West Coast tour of the play.

Bela Lugosi, the genius of terror films

Lugosi remained in California where he resumed his film work under contract with Fox, appearing in early talkies often as a heavy or an exotic sheik. He also continued to lobby for his prized role in the film version of Dracula.

Despite his critically acclaimed performance on stage, Lugosi was not Universal Pictures' first choice for the role of Dracula when the company optioned the rights to the Deane play and began production in 1930. Different prominent actors were considered before Browning cast Lugosi for the role, but the film was a hit.

Through his association with Dracula -in which he appeared with minimal makeup, using his natural, heavily accented voice-, Lugosi found himself typecast as a horror villain in films such as Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The Raven (1935), and Son of Frankenstein (1939) for Universal, and the independent White Zombie (1932). His accent, while a part of his image, limited the roles he could play.

Lugosi did attempt to break type by auditioning for other roles. He lost out to Lionel Barrymore for the role of Grigori Rasputin in Rasputin and the Empress (1932); C. Henry Gordon for the role of Surat Khan in Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), and Basil Rathbone for the role of Commissar Dimitri Gorotchenko in Tovarich (1937) a role Lugosi had played on stage.

More information: Syfy Wire

Regardless of controversy, five films at Universal  -The Black Cat (1934), The Raven (1935), The Invisible Ray (1936), Son of Frankenstein (1939), Black Friday (1940), plus minor cameo performances in Gift of Gab (1934) and two at RKO Pictures, You'll Find Out (1940) and The Body Snatcher (1945) -paired Lugosi with Boris Karloff. 

Lugosi did get a few heroic leads, as in Universal's The Black Cat after Karloff had been accorded the more colorful role of the villain, The Invisible Ray, and a romantic role in producer Sol Lesser's adventure serial The Return of Chandu (1934), but his typecasting problem appears to have been too entrenched to be alleviated by those films.

Lugosi addressed his plea to be cast in non-horror roles directly to casting directors through his listing in the 1937 Players Directory, published by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in which he or his agent calls the idea that he is only fit for horror films an error.

Bela Lugosi in The Raven

A number of factors began to work against Lugosi's career in the mid-1930s. Universal changed management in 1936, and because of a British ban on horror films, dropped them from their production schedule; Lugosi found himself consigned to Universal's non-horror B-film unit, at times in small roles where he was obviously used for name value only. 

Throughout the 1930s, Lugosi, experiencing a severe career decline despite popularity with audiences -Universal executives always preferred his rival Karloff-, accepted many leading roles from independent producers like Nat Levine, Sol Lesser, and Sam Katzman. These low-budget thrillers indicate that Lugosi was less discriminating than Karloff in selecting screen vehicles, but the exposure helped Lugosi financially if not artistically. 

Lugosi tried to keep busy with stage work, but had to borrow money from the Actors Fund of America to pay hospital bills when his only child, Bela George Lugosi, was born in 1938.

The first was Universal's Son of Frankenstein (1939), when he played the character role of Ygor, a mad blacksmith with a broken neck, in heavy makeup and beard. The same year saw Lugosi making a rare appearance in an A-list motion picture: he was a stern commissar in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's romantic comedy Ninotchka, starring Greta Garbo and directed by Ernst Lubitsch.

More information: The Vintage News

Lugosi was effective in this small but prestigious character role, and it could have been a turning point for the actor, but within the year, he was back on Hollywood's Poverty Row, playing leads for Sam Katzman. These horror, comedy and mystery B-films were released by Monogram Pictures. At Universal, he often received star billing for what amounted to a supporting part. The Gorilla (1939) had him playing straight man to Patsy Kelly and the Ritz Brothers.

Ostensibly due to injuries received during military service, Lugosi developed severe, chronic sciatica. Though at first he was treated with pain remedies such as asparagus juice, doctors increased the medication to opiates. The growth of his dependence on analgesic drugs, particularly morphine and, after 1947 when it became available in America, methadone, was directly proportional to the dwindling of screen offers. He was finally cast in the role of Frankenstein's monster for Universal's Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), but Lugosi had no dialogue.

Bela Lugosi

Lugosi's voice had been dubbed over that of Lon Chaney Jr., from line readings at the end of The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942).

Lugosi played Dracula for a second and last time on film in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), his last A movie.

In September 1949 Milton Berle invited Lugosi to appear in a sketch on Texaco Star Theatre. Lugosi memorized the script for the skit, but became confused on the air when Berle began to ad lib. His only television dramatic role was on the anthology series Suspense on October 11, 1949, in an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado.

In 1951, while in England to play a six-month tour of Dracula, Lugosi co-starred in a lowbrow film comedy, Mother Riley Meets the Vampire -also known as Vampire over London and My Son, the Vampire-, released the following year. 

 More information: BBC

Following his return to the United States, he was interviewed for television, and reflected wistfully on his typecasting in horror parts: Now I am the boogie man. Independent producer Jack Broder took Lugosi at his word, casting him in a jungle-themed comedy, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), co-starring nightclub comedians Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, whose act closely resembled that of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

Lugosi died of a heart attack on August 16, 1956, while lying on a bed in his Los Angeles apartment. He was 73. The rumor that Lugosi was clutching the script for The Final Curtain, a planned Ed Wood project, at the time of his death is not true.

Lugosi was buried wearing one of the Dracula cape costumes in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Contrary to popular belief, Lugosi never requested to be buried in his cloak; Bela G. Lugosi confirmed on numerous occasions that he and his mother, Lillian, actually made the decision but believed that it is what his father would have wanted.

More information: Los Angeles Times

The actor depends wholly on himself.

He gives his performance in what, to him,

seems the most effective manner.

Bela Lugosi