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Bela Lugosi Continued
Apparently, I’m still a bit under Bela Lugosi’s spell, because I can’t quit researching him. On the website for Lugosi Enterprises, I found this Biography page which I assume was written by Bela Lugosi’s son, Bela Lugosi Jr. I thought it was a sweet, insightful read.
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11 Days of Halloween
Today is the 129th anniversary of Béla Lugosi’s birth, and I’m here to pay homage. He was actually a fascinating person. You can read the wiki bio, and the biography.com bio here, as well as his imdb page. But I’ve composed my own photo/video biography below.
If you can’t be bothered to read about him, watch Martin Landau’s portrayal of him in Ed Wood. It really isn’t very accurate, but it won Landau an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor and it’s really quite funny. Plus, it has Johnny Depp, and everyone loves Johnny Depp. You can watch Ed Wood for free on YouTube. Actually, you know what? I’ll embed it in another blog post for you. Enjoy.
So, Béla Lugosi….
First, it’s pronounced bay-la, not bella like the character of a certain vampire series that shall remain nameless in Mr. Lugosi’s presence. He was 6’1” and had blue eyes; born Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó, October 20, 1882 in Lugos, Hungary (now Romania) some fifty odd miles from Poenari Castle, the home of real-life Dracula, Vlad the Impaler. He took his stage name, Lugosi, from Lugos. He attended grammar school until age 11 when he ran away and settled in the small mining town of Resita working in the mines and as a machinist’s assistant.
“I was very unruly as a boy, very out of control. Like Jekyll and Hyde, except that I changed according to sex. I mean, with boys I was tough and brutal. But the minute I came into company with girls and women, I kissed their hands… With boys, I say, I was a brute. With girls, I was a lamb.”
In Resita, Béla became captivated by passing theatrical groups on tour and set his heart on becoming an actor.
”They tried to give me little parts in their plays, but I was so uneducated, so stupid, people just laughed at me. But I got the taste of the stage. I got, also, the rancid taste of humiliation.”
In 1897, at 15, he left Resita to live with his sister and mother in Szabadka. A year later he returned to school but dropped out after four months. Soon after, his brother-in-law managed to land Béla a place in the chorus of a traveling theater company. Despite a lack of education and training, he displayed remarkable raw talent and quickly ascended from the back of the chorus into leading roles. He even played in Shakespearean classics such as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Richard III, and The Taming of the Shrew. He sometimes appeared in Hungarian films under the name Arisztid Olt.
“In Hungary, acting is a career for which one fits himself as earnestly and studiously as one studies for a degree in medecine, law, or philosophy. In Hungary, acting is a profession.”
In 1913, he joined the Hungarian National Theater in Budapest and starred in more Shakespearean plays, as well as Cyrano de Bergerac and Faust. But in 1914, although members of the National Theater were exempt from military service, the highly patriotic Béla put his acting career on hold to fight for Hungary against Russia in World War I. He served as an infantry lieutenant from 1914-1916 and his duties included acting as a hangman and he was wounded three times in his service. He was also said to have once hidden in a mass grave of corpses to escape death. For his efforts, he rose to the rank of infantry captain in the ski patrol was awarded a medal for his wounds at the Russian front.
After being discharged in 1916, Béla returned to the National Theater and delivered a celebrated performance as Jesus Christ in The Passion. Over the next few years, Béla gradually transitioned from stage acting into Hungary’s rapidly growing silent film industry. He also married Ilona Scmick in 1917. In addition to acting in many Hungarian silent films, Béla organized Hungary’s National Trade Union of Actors, the world’s first actors’ union. He was also a staunch supporter of the 1919 Hungarian Revolution that briefly brought Bela Kun’s Hungarian Soviet Republic into power. As a result, when that revolution collapsed, Béla found himself a wanted enemy of the new government.
”After the war, I participated in the revolution. Later, I found myself on the wrong side.”
In 1919, at age 37, Béla fled to Vienna, as legend has it, buried beneath a pile of straw in a wheelbarrow, but he went alone. His wife, Ilona Scmick, would not leave her home country of Hungary, and they divorced. From there he traveled to Berlin where he quickly found work in the German cinema. He appeared in several German films in 1920, most notably The Head of Janus, an adaptation of Robert Loius Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Despite his quick success in Germany, Béla decided to immigrate to the United States, arriving in New Orleans on December 4, 1920. He immediately made his way to New York City, where a sizeable Hungarian theatrical community welcomed him with open arms, and Béla occupied himself as an actor and director of many Hungarian productions over the next several years. In 1921, he married Ilona von Montagh.
Despite not yet having a firm grasp of the language, he made his English-language debut in a 1922 production of The Red Poppy, for which he memorized his lines phonetically. His excellent reviews from The Red Poppy earned him his American film debut as the villainous Hisston in The Silent Command (1923). He later appeared in The Midnight Girl in 1925. Since silent films still dominated, Béla’s language skills were not a barrier to his acting in American movies. He divorced Ilona von Montagh in 1924.
In 1927, at age 45, Béla accepted the role of Dracula in the theatrical run of the play based on Bram Stoker’s gothic novel of the same name. Béla’s Dracula was unlike any previous portrayals of the role. Handsome, mysterious, alluring, Béla’s Dracula was at once so sexy and so haunting that audiences gasped when he first opened his mouth to speak. After a half-year run on Broadway, Dracula toured the United States to much fanfare and critical acclaim throughtout 1928 and 1929. Béla was married to Beatrice Weeks for 3 days late 1929. Weeks cited Clara Bow as “the other woman.”
“It is a marvelous play. We keep nurses and physicians in the theatre every night… for the people in the audience who faint.”
With the popularization of “talking pictures” or “talkies” -movies with sound- Universal decided to make a film version of Dracula. It is rumored that were it not for his death, Lon Chaney would have been cast as Dracula by director Tod Browning instead of Béla. As it were, although Béla still did not fully grasp the English language, (he would become fluent 2 years later), he was chosen to portray Dracula, at age 49, and used his tried and true method of phonetic memorization to help learn his lines. In 1931, Dracula opened in theaters to much acclaim, and Béla became a naturalized American citizen. His performance created such a sensation that he reportedly received more fan mail from females than even Clark Gable, star of Gone With the Wind. In 1933, Béla married Lillian Arch, with whom he would have his longest lasting marriage.
In 1932, he conducted this interview with Dorothy West.
Throughout the 1930s, Béla was typecast as a Hollywood horror villain in dozens of B-list films -playing monsters, murderers, and mad scientists- although he would only ever play a vampire four times: in Dracula, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Mark of the Vampire, and, Return of the Vampire. While none of these roles were especially noteworthy in isolation, save Dracula, Béla’s cumulative body of work during the 1930s established him as one of the first great stars of the horror genre. Nevertheless, Béla was frustrated by his inability to break through into other types of films.
“I am definitely typed, doomed to be an exponent of evil. But I want sympathetic roles. Then parents would tell their offspring, ‘Eat your spinach and you’ll grow up to be a nice man like Bela Lugosi.’ As it is, they threaten their children with me instead of the bogey-man.”
“I find that, because of my language and gestures, that I am cataloged as what you call a ‘heavy.’ My accent stamped me, in the imagination of the producers, as an enemy. Therefore, I must be a heavy.”
Béla spent a few lean years in the late 1930s, when horror movies fell out of vogue in Hollywood and his wife bore him a son, Béla Lugosi Jr, in 1938, when Béla Sr was 56 years old. But in the 1940s, Béla once again began appearing in countless horror films, as well as sequels and spoofs. However, despite his prolific acting career and high profile, due to Universal’s ruthless compensation system and his own careless spending, Lugosi lived the majority of his adult life deeply mired in debt. He often rented his house for film companies to use when he was short on cash.
In the late 1940s, when the acting jobs dried up, Béla became seriously addicted to morphine, which was prescribed to him for pain associated with his war injuries. In 1953, Lillian Arch divorced Béla. He spent the last few years of his career in the early 1950s back on the stage in revival productions of Dracula as well as Arsenic and Old Lace. This interview was shot in 1951 upon Béla’s return from England to film Vampire Over London.
He also checked into a rehabilitation center in the 1950s and was treated for alcohol and morphine abuse. He filmed this interview after he completed rehab, the costs of which were helped covered by Frank Sinatra; which shocked Béla as he had never even met Sinatra.
“My Body grew hot, then cold. I tried to eat the bed sheets. My heart beat madly. Every joint in my body ached. When I took the cure, they took it all away from me.”
In 1955, Béla married Hope Lininger. A year later, Béla began work on a sci-fi thriller called Plan 9 from Outer Space, which would later earn acclaim as “the worst movie of all time.” Sadly, he passed away during filming on August 16, 1956, of a heart attack in his home, at age 73. He was fittingly buried, per Lillian and Béla Jr’s request, in his Dracula cape, tuxedo, and medallion. Frank Sinatra extended his generosity one last time to help cover Béla’s funeral costs. He is interred at Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City, California; specific interment location: Grotto, L120, 1.
The actor who became synonymous with Dracula, Béla Lugosi paved the way for the incredible proliferation of vampire movies in Hollywood. His depiction of Dracula as at once dangerous and mysteriously sexy continues to shape the way vampires are portrayed today.
“A screen actor is compensated in the knowledge that millions will see his performance at one time, when only hundreds will see it on stage.”
“Every actor’s greatest ambition is to create his own definite and original role, but I found this to be almost fatal.”
Home movie footage of Béla Lugosi and young Béla Jr.
Finally, Béla Lugosi Jr talks briefly about father.
