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When I was growing up, I loved horror movies --
especially monster movies. I don't mean the gorefests
that populate the screen today; the ones that substitute shock for real
psychological terror. No, I loved the Universal monster
movies that featured the Wolf Man,
the Invisible Man, Dracula, and, most of all, Frankenstein’s monster
(or just "Frankenstein,"
as we called him in those days).
Most of the reason for that love was Boris Karloff.
In spite of how many people he murdered,
tortured, or terrorized
on camera, it was obvious that, behind the character, there was a decent and funny man who projected a real humanity.
Karloff was born on November 23, 1887, as William Henry Pratt. As a child, it
was expected he'd follow his brother into the British Foreign Service, but he developed a love of acting that took him first to
Canada, then finally to Hollywood, where between gigs acting in silent films,
he worked as a ditch digger and truck driver to pay the bills.
When sound films came along in the late 1920s, his stage training (and
British accent) helped him make the transition to talkies, but he was still
mired in supporting roles like "Rev. T. Vernon Isopod" or "Sport Williams."
Finally, in 1931, the role of a lifetime -- the Frankenstein monster -- came along, and even though he was unbilled at the
time (the credits showed the Monster as being played by "?"),
he had achieved screen immortality, becoming one of the few actors to be so
well known as to be billed with just one name: "Karloff."
It took Universal a bit of time to realize what an asset they had in Karloff.
They loaned him out to Warner Bros. for a memorable turn as a cadaverous
gangster in the original Scarface
and to MGM to star in the insidious (if racially insensitive) Dr. Fu Manchu.
But once Frankenstein's box-office returns came in ($12,000,000
-- nearly $200 million today... that's before adjusting for the 25 cents
audiences paid in 1931!), they took full advantage of him in such classics as The Old Dark House, The Mummy, The Black Cat,
and (best of all) The Bride of
Frankenstein -- some 42 features
over the next ten years.
In 1941, Karloff left Hollywood to appear on Broadway in the comedy Arsenic and Old Lace, playing another homicidal maniac -- one who’d had
plastic surgery and now looked like -- Boris Karloff.
Over the next three decades, Karloff alternated between stage,
screen,
radio, and television, shifting easily between comedy and drama. His integrity
and talent were such that, even after the many times he had kidded his
"horror star" image, he was still utterly believable when he did a
straight role that would scare the pants off audiences.
When he died at the age of 81 in 1967, his name was still the gold
standard for the genre, (an accomplishment that no one else -- in any film
genre -- has ever matched) and for some of us, it still is.
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