Lugosi, Bela
Entry updated 14 October 2024. Tagged: Film, People.
Working name of Hungarian-born Horror actor Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó (1882-1956), in the US from 1920, who became a US citizen in 1931. He first achieved fame with his title role in the 1927 Broadway stage version of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), leading to his star part in the Universal Pictures Dracula (1931) directed by Tod Browning. In non-Vampire films, unfortunately, his heavy Hungarian accent tended to limit him to such roles as Mad Scientists and mute or inarticulate servitors, the classic example of the latter being Ygor in Son of Frankenstein (1939) (see Frankenstein). Owing also to drug dependence increasingly compounded by alcoholism he was to some extent blacklisted by Cinema producers, eventually appearing only in low-budget B-movies.
His films with full entries in this encyclopedia are, in chronological order: Island of Lost Souls (1932), The Invisible Ray (1936), The Phantom Creeps (1939), Black Friday (1940; vt Friday the Thirteenth), The Devil Bat (1940; vt Killer Bats), The Corpse Vanishes (1942; vt The Case of the Missing Brides), The Ape Man (1943), Return of the Ape Man (1944) – not in fact a sequel to the preceding film – Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), The Black Sleep (1956; vt Dr Cadman's Secret) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). The posthumous appearance in the last comprised brief footage in which Lugosi swirled his famous Dracula cape; all his plot-related actions in Ed Wood's film were performed by a "double" sinisterly masking his face with a cape.
Lugosi apparently published one story of genre interest, "The Bat" in The Vampire Omnibus (anth 1995) edited by Peter Haining; this was extracted from "Lugosi's Haunted House" (November 1969 Famous Monsters of Filmland #59), whose framing device has the tale told by Lugosi to an unnamed first-person narrator, presumably the editor Forrest J Ackerman. Considering the lapse of time since the actor's death, one suspects that Ackerman might have invented the whole thing. [DRL]
Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó
born Lugos, Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire [now Lugoj, Romania]: 20 October 1882
died Los Angeles, California: 16 August 1956
about the actor
- Robert Cremer. Béla Lugosi: The Man Behind the Cape (San Diego, California: Clover Press, 2025) [nonfiction: hb/photographic]
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