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Bela Lugosi: Enduring Screen Icon

Whether one views him as an iconic master of the macabre or a troubled performer who never got the attention he deserved, Bela Lugosi’s name still rings bells — typically large ones, perched atop the spire of a weathered Gothic castle.

Born Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó in 1882 to a middle-class family in Lugos, Austria-Hungary, Lugosi dropped out of school at age twelve to pursue his dream of becoming a thespian. For the next two decades, Lugosi traveled throughout the continent and beyond, acting in stage productions and early silent films before eventually ending up in America, where he landed a career-making role in the 1927 Broadway production of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Though the quality of Lugosi’s artistic output waxed and waned in the thirty years that followed, his on-screen image remained largely tethered to the aesthetics of Count Dracula. Nevertheless, Lugosi boasts a diverse filmography peppered with pictures ranging

Actor Bela Lugosi discusses his career, his social life, and his feelings about his most famous role, Count Dracula.

Prevues of his films, interviews, short subjects. And Lugosi on ‘You Asked For It’ and more.

This interview took place as Lugosi was coming back from a failed trip to Europe, but Bela tried to put a gam face on it.

Bela Lugosi, as a mad scientist consumes a potion which transforms him into a blood-thirsty ape freak.

Why Betty Boop Still Tickles Our Fancy

Before Willem Dafoe and Anthony Hopkins, Boris Karloff was the go-to character actor when it came to portraying all facets of the seedier side of hum

In Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), private detective Eddie Valiant is slumped at a table at the Ink and Paint Club, awaiting suspect Jessica Rabbit’s performance,

when a voice calls from off-screen, “Cigars? Cigarettes?” With just two words in that warbling baby voice, Eddie knows who the cigarette girl is before he sees her: Betty Boop.

“What are you doing here?” Eddie asks Betty. The 1930’s star is out of place in the 1947 film noir setting.

“Work’s been kinda slow since cartoons went to color,” Betty bashfully rolls her shoulders.

Betty Boop in fact starred in one color cartoon, Poor Cinderella of 1934. That it was Fleischer Studios’ first foray into color speaks to Betty’s popularity. Poor Cinderella boasts lovely painted

Boris Karloff: Enduring Screen Icon

Before Willem Dafoe and Anthony Hopkins, Boris Karloff was the go-to character actor when it came to portraying all facets of the seedier side of humanity.

In Universal Studios’ The Mummy (1932), Boris Karloff plays an Egyptian named Imhotep who is revived after 2,700 years of slumber when an archeologist’s assistant reads aloud the hieroglyphics of a cursed scroll. Some version of this story has been regurgitated onscreen nearly every decade since, but the title character has never been performed with Boris Karloff’s astonishing pathos, grace, and intensity. These represent merely a fraction of the attributes that make Karloff an abiding legend of the silver screen.

The Mummy’s loony premise doesn’t seem to faze him as an actor; he enunciates his dialogue with the same focused severity required to play King Lear. Lines like “My love has lasted longer than the temples of our gods” might elicit overacting from lesser

Bela Lugosi is a coffin-sleeping scientist who needs food for his robot. Arthur Lucan reprises his role in this the last of the Old Mother Riley series.

The East Side Kids try to fix up a house for newlyweds, but find the place next door “haunted” by mysterious men dodging in and out of secret panels and clearly up to no good. The East Side Kids decide to do some redecorating for a pal on his honeymoon. He’s marrying Ava Gardner and the gang wants to give him a token of friendship. However,Bela Lugosi appears talking about being surrounded by imbeciles. No spooks, but some WWII spies. An early version of the Bowery Boys, this film is silly entertainment.