Vincent Price
Vincent Leonard Price Jr. was an American actor, known to film audiences for his work in the horror genre, mostly portraying villains. He appeared on stage, television, and radio, and in more than 100 films. Price has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for motion pictures and one for television.
After varied stage work, including a stint with the Mercury Theatre, Price's first film role was as a leading man in the 1938 comedy Service de Luxe. He became a character actor, appearing in The Song of Bernadette, Laura, The Keys of the Kingdom, Leave Her to Heaven, Dragonwyck, The Three Musketeers and The Ten Commandments. He established himself in the horror genre with roles in House of Wax, The Fly, House on Haunted Hill, Return of the Fly, The Tingler, The Last Man on Earth, Witchfinder General, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, and Theatre of Blood. He collaborated with Roger Corman on a series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, including House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Haunted Palace, and The Masque of the Red Death. Price appeared in the television series Batman as Egghead.
Price voiced the villainous Professor Ratigan in Disney's animated film The Great Mouse Detective, and appeared in the drama The Whales of August, which earned him an Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male nomination. Price's final film was Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands. For his contributions to cinema, he received lifetime achievement or special tribute awards from Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films; Fantasporto; Bram Stoker Awards; and Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Price narrated animated films, radio dramas, and documentaries, and provided the narration in Michael Jackson's song "Thriller". For his voice work in Great American Speeches, Price was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.
Price was an art collector and arts consultant, with a degree in art history. He lectured and wrote books on art. The Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College is named in his honor. Price was a gourmet cook and cookbook author.
Early life and education
Vincent Leonard Price Jr. was born on May 27, 1911, in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest of the four children of Vincent Leonard Price, president of the National Candy Company, and his wife Marguerite Cobb Price. His grandfather was Vincent Clarence Price, who invented "Dr. Price's Baking Powder", the first cream of tartar-based baking powder, and it secured the family's fortune. Price was of Welsh and English descent and was a descendant, via his paternal grandmother, of Peregrine White, the first child born in colonial Massachusetts, being born on the Mayflower while it was in Provincetown Harbor in Massachusetts.Price attended the St. Louis Country Day School, and took a summer course at Milford Academy in Milford, Connecticut. In 1933, he graduated with a degree in English and a minor in art history from Yale University, where he worked on the campus humor magazine The Yale Record. After teaching for a year, he entered The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, intending to study for a master's degree in fine arts.
Instead he was drawn to the theater, first appearing on stage professionally in 1935 in the play Chicago at the Gate Theatre in London. Next he introduced the role of Prince Albert in Laurence Housman's play Victoria Regina, also at the Gate Theatre in 1935. Later that year he moved to New York City to reprise the role of Prince Albert in the Broadway production of Victoria Regina, opposite Helen Hayes in the title role of Queen Victoria. He played the role for two seasons at the Broadhurst Theatre, through June 1937. In 1938 he appeared in productions of The Shoemaker's Holiday and Heartbreak House with Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre company. From 1941 to 1942, Price played Mr. Manningham in Angel Street, the Broadway production of Gas Light, which he helped bring to New York.
Career
Early film roles
Price started out in films as a character actor. He made his film debut in Service de Luxe, and established himself in the film Laura, opposite Gene Tierney, directed by Otto Preminger. He played Joseph Smith in the movie Brigham Young and William Gibbs McAdoo in Wilson, as well as Bernadette's prosecutor, Vital Dutour, in The Song of Bernadette, and as a pretentious priest in The Keys of the Kingdom.Price's first venture into the horror genre, for which he later became widely known, was in the Boris Karloff film Tower of London. The following year, Price portrayed the title character in The Invisible Man Returns. He reunited with Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven and Dragonwyck. He also had many villainous roles in film noir thrillers such as The Web, The Long Night, Rogues' Regiment, and The Bribe, with Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner, and Charles Laughton.
Price's first starring role was as con man James Reavis in the biographical film The Baron of Arizona. He did a comedic turn as the tycoon Burnbridge Waters, co-starring with Ronald Colman in Champagne for Caesar, one of his favorite film roles.
1950s
Price was active in radio, portraying the Robin Hood-inspired crime-fighter Simon Templar in The Saint, which ran from 1947 to 1951. In the 1950s, Price moved into more regular horror-film roles with the leading role in House of Wax as a homicidal sculptor, the first three-dimensional film to land in the year's top 10 at the North American box-office. His next roles were The Mad Magician, the monster movie The Fly, and its sequel Return of the Fly. That same year, Price starred in two thrillers by producer-director William Castle: House on Haunted Hill as eccentric millionaire Fredrick Loren, and The Tingler as Dr. Warren Chapin, who discovered the titular creature. He appeared in the radio drama Three Skeleton Key, the story of an island lighthouse besieged by an army of rats. He had first performed the work in 1950 on Escape and returned to it in 1956 and 1958 for Suspense.Outside the horror realm, Price played Baka in The Ten Commandments, released in 1956. About this time, he also appeared in episodes of television shows such as Science Fiction Theatre, Playhouse 90, and General Electric Theater. In the 1955–56 television season, he was cast three times on the religion anthology series Crossroads. In the 1955 episode "Cleanup", Price portrayed the Reverend Robert Russell. In 1956, he was cast as Rabbi Gershom Mendes Seixas in "The Rebel", and as the Rev. Alfred W. Price in "God's Healing".
1960s
In the 1960s, Price achieved a number of low-budget filmmaking successes with Roger Corman and American International Pictures starting with the House of Usher, which earned over $2 million at the box office in the United States and led to the subsequent Edgar Allan Poe adaptations of The Pit and the Pendulum, Tales of Terror, The Comedy of Terrors, The Raven, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Tomb of Ligeia. He starred in The Last Man on Earth, the first adaptation of the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend, and later starred as Felix Manderville in House of 1,000 Dolls, which has been described as "quite possibly the sleaziest movie AIP ever made". A year later, Price portrayed witch hunter Matthew Hopkins in Witchfinder General, set during the English Civil War. Price also starred in comedy films such as Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine and its sequel Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs. In 1968, he played the part of an eccentric artist in the musical Darling of the Day, opposite Patricia Routledge.In the 1960s, Price began his role as a guest on the television game show Hollywood Squares, becoming a semi-regular in the 1970s, including being one of the guest panelists on the finale in 1980.
Price made many guest-star appearances in television shows during the decade, including The Red Skelton Show, Daniel Boone, F Troop, Get Smart, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. He had a recurring role in the Batman TV series as the villain Egghead from 1966 to 1967. In 1964, he provided the narration for the Tombstone Historama in Tombstone, Arizona, which was still in operation as of 2016. He also starred as the host of the Australian TV series If These Walls Could Speak, in which a short history of an historical building was covered, and as the narrating voice of the building.
1970s
During the early 1970s, Price hosted and starred in BBC Radio's horror and mystery series The Price of Fear. He accepted a cameo part in the Canadian children's television program The Hilarious House of Frightenstein in Hamilton, Ontario, on the local television station CHCH-TV, filming all of his 400 segments over the course of only a few days. In addition to the opening and closing monologs, his role in the show was to recite poems about various characters, sometimes wearing a cloak or other costumes. He appeared in The Abominable Dr. Phibes, its sequel Dr. Phibes Rises Again, and Theatre of Blood, in which he portrayed one of two serial killers. That same year, he appeared as himself in Mooch Goes to Hollywood, a film written by Jim Backus.Price was an admirer of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and in 1975 visited the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, where he had his picture taken with the museum's popular stuffed raven. Price also recorded dramatic readings of Poe's short stories and poems, which were collected together with readings by Basil Rathbone.
In 1975, Price and his wife Coral Browne appeared together in an international stage adaptation of Ardèle, which played in the U.S. and in London at the Queen's Theatre. During this run, Browne and Price starred together in the BBC Radio play Night of the Wolf first airing in 1975. Price greatly reduced his film work from around 1975, as horror itself suffered a slump, and he increased his narrative and voice work, as well as advertising Milton Bradley's Shrunken Head Apple Sculpture.
Price provided a monolog for the Alice Cooper song "The Black Widow" on the Welcome to My Nightmare album in 1975, and he appeared in the corresponding TV special Alice Cooper: The Nightmare. He starred for a year in the early 1970s in the syndicated daily radio program Tales of the Unexplained. He made guest appearances in a 1970 episode of Here's Lucy, showcasing his art expertise, and in a 1972 episode of ABC's The Brady Bunch, in which he played a deranged archaeologist. In October 1976, he appeared as the featured guest in an episode of The Muppet Show. In 1977, Price recorded a cover version of Bobby "Boris" Pickett's 1962 Single record The Monster Mash produced by UK record producers Ken Burgess and Bob Newby and released in the UK by EMI Records.
Also in 1977, Price began performing as Oscar Wilde in the one-man stage play Diversions and Delights, written by John Gay and directed by Joe Hardy, and set in a Parisian theater on a night about one year before Wilde's death. The original tour of the play was a success in every city except for New York City. In the summer of 1979, Price performed the role of Wilde at the Tabor Opera House in Leadville, Colorado, on the same stage from which Wilde had spoken to miners about art some 96 years before. He eventually performed the play worldwide. Victoria Price stated in her biography of her father that several members of Price's family and friends thought that this was his best acting performance.
In 1979, Price starred with his wife in the short-lived CBS series Time Express. That same year he hosted the hour-long television special America Screams, riding on several roller coasters and recounting their history. During 1979–1980, he hosted the "Mystery Night" segment of the radio series Sears Radio Theater.