Boris Karloff
(Read about Boris Karloff after the video)
William Henry Pratt (23 November 1887 – 2 February 1969), better known by his stage name Boris Karloff, was an English actor.[2]
He was widely known for his roles in horror films, particularly for his portrayal of Frankenstein's monster in Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and Son of Frankenstein (1939), which resulted in his immense popularity. His best-known non-horror role is as the Grinch, as well as the narrator, in the animated television special of Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966). Karloff guest starred in a 1966 TV episode of The Wild Wild West, "The Night of the Golden Cobra". He also had a memorable role in the original Scarface (1932). For his contribution to film and television, Boris Karloff was awarded two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Early years
Boris Karloff was born William Henry Pratt on 23 November 1887[3] at 36 Forest Hill Road, Camberwell, London, England.[4] Pratt himself stated that he was born in Dulwich, which is nearby in London.[5]
His parents were Edward John Pratt, Jr. and Eliza Sarah Millard. His
maternal grandparents were James Millard and Eliza Julia Edwards, a
sister of Anna Leonowens (whose tales about life in the royal court of Siam [now Thailand] were the basis of the musical The King and I). The two sisters may have had some Anglo-Indian ancestry.[6]
Pratt spent his childhood years in Enfield, in the County of Middlesex.
He was the youngest of nine children, and following his mother's death
was brought up by his elder siblings. He received his early education at
Enfield Grammar School, and later at the private schools of Uppingham School and Merchant Taylors' School. After this he attended King's College London
where he took studies aimed at a career with the British Government's
Consular Service. However, in 1909 he left university without graduating
and drifted, departing England for Canada, where he worked as a farm
labourer and did various odd itinerant jobs until happening into acting.[7] His brother, Sir John Thomas Pratt, became a distinguished British diplomat.[8] He was bow-legged, had a lisp, and stuttered as a young boy.[9] He conquered his stutter, but not his lisp, which was noticeable all through his following career.
Acting career
In Canada
he began appearing in theatrical performances, and during this period
he adopted the professional name of "Boris Karloff". Some have theorised
that he took the stage name from a mad scientist character in the novel The Drums of Jeopardy
called "Boris Karlov". However, the novel was not published until 1920,
at least eight years after Karloff had been using the name on stage and
in silent films (Warner Oland played "Boris Karlov" in a film version in 1931). Another possible influence was thought to be a character in the Edgar Rice Burroughs fantasy novel H. R. H. The Rider
which features a "Prince Boris of Karlova", but as the novel was not
published until 1915, the influence may be backward, that Burroughs saw
Karloff in a play and adapted the name for the character. Karloff always
claimed he chose the first name "Boris" because it sounded foreign and
exotic, and that "Karloff" was a family name (from Karlov – in Cyrillic,
Карлов – a name found in several Slavic countries, including Russia,
Ukraine and Bulgaria[10]).
However, his daughter Sara Karloff publicly denied any knowledge of
Slavic forebears, "Karloff" or otherwise. One reason for the name change
was to prevent embarrassment to his family. Whether or not his brothers
(all dignified members of the British Foreign Service)
actually considered young William the "black sheep of the family" for
having become an actor, Karloff apparently worried they felt that way.
He did not reunite with his family until he returned to Britain to make The Ghoul
(1933), extremely worried that his siblings would disapprove of his
new, macabre claim to world fame. Instead, his brothers jostled for
position around him and happily posed for publicity photographs. After
the photo was taken, Karloff’s brothers immediately started asking about
getting a copy of their own of it. The story of the photo became one of
Karloff’s favorites.[11]
Karloff joined the Jeanne Russell Company in 1911 and performed in towns like Kamloops, British Columbia, and Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. After the devastating tornado in Regina on 30 June 1912, Karloff and other performers helped with clean-up efforts.[12] He later took a job as a railway baggage handler and joined the Harry St. Clair Co. that performed in Minot, North Dakota, for a year in an opera house above a hardware store.
Due to the years of difficult manual labour that Karloff had had to
perform in Canada and the US to make ends meet whilst he was trying to
establish his acting career, he was left with back problems from which
he suffered for the rest of his life. Because of his health, he did not
fight in the First World War.
Hollywood
Once Karloff arrived in Hollywood, he made dozens of silent films,
but work was sporadic, and he often had to take up manual labour such
as digging ditches or delivering construction plaster to earn a living. A
number of his early major roles were in film serials, such as The Masked Rider (1919), in Chapter 2 of which he can be glimpsed onscreen for the first time, The Hope Diamond Mystery (1920) and King of the Wild
(1930). In these early roles he was often cast as an exotic Arabian or
Indian villain. A key film which brought Karloff recognition was The Criminal Code
(1931), a prison drama in which he reprised a dramatic part he had
played on stage. Another significant role in the autumn of 1931 saw
Karloff play a key supporting part as an unethical newspaper reporter in
Five Star Final, a film about tabloid journalism which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Stardom
His role as Frankenstein's monster in Frankenstein
(1931) made Karloff a star. The bulky costume with four inch platform
boots made it an arduous role but the costume and extensive makeup
produced the classic image. The costume was a job in itself for Karloff
with the shoes weighing 11 pounds (5 kg) each.[13] Universal Studios was quick to acquire ownership of the copyright to the makeup format for the Frankenstein monster that Jack P. Pierce had designed. A year later, Karloff played another iconic character, Imhotep in The Mummy. The Old Dark House (with Charles Laughton) and the starring role in The Mask of Fu Manchu quickly followed. These films all confirmed Karloff's new-found stardom.
The 5'11" (1.80 m) brown-eyed Karloff played a wide variety of roles
in other genres besides horror. He was memorably gunned down in a
bowling alley in the 1932 film Scarface. He played a religious First World War soldier in the 1934 John Ford epic The Lost Patrol.
Horror had become Karloff's primary genre, and he gave a string of
lauded performances in 1930s Universal horror films, including several
with Bela Lugosi, his main rival as heir to Lon Chaney's status as the top horror film star. Karloff reprised the role of Frankenstein's monster in two other films, Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Son of Frankenstein
(1939), the latter also featuring Lugosi. Karloff revisited the
Frankenstein mythos in several later films as well, taking the starring
role of the villainous Dr. Niemann in House of Frankenstein (1944), in which the monster was played by Glenn Strange. He reprised the role of the "mad scientist" in 1958's Frankenstein 1970 as Baron Victor von Frankenstein II, the grandson of the original creator. The finale reveals that the crippled Baron has given his own face (i. e., Karloff's) to the monster.
Between 1938 and 1940, Karloff appeared in five films
for Monogram Pictures. Directed by William Nigh, Karloff portrayed
character James Lee Wong, a Chinese detective. More commonly referred to
as Mr. Wong, Karloff's portrayal of the character is an example of Hollywood's use of yellowface and its portrayal of East Asians in the earlier half of the 20th century.
Karloff appeared at a celebrity baseball game as Frankenstein's monster in 1940, hitting a gag home run and making catcher Buster Keaton fall into an acrobatic dead faint as the monster stomped into home plate. Norman Z. McLeod filmed a sequence in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
with Karloff in the Frankenstein monster make-up, but it was deleted
from the finished film. However, Karloff still appeared in that film in a
brief but starring role as Dr. Hollingshead. Karloff donned the monster
make-up for the last time in 1962 for a Halloween episode of the TV
series Route 66, which also featured Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney, Jr.[14]
While the long, creative partnership between Karloff and Bela Lugosi
never led to a close friendship, it produced some of the actors' most
revered and enduring productions, beginning with The Black Cat (1934). Follow-ups included Gift of Gab (1934), The Raven (1935), The Invisible Ray (1936), Black Friday (1940), You'll Find Out (also 1940), and The Body Snatcher (1945). During this period, he also starred with Basil Rathbone in Tower of London (1939) as the murderous henchman of King Richard III, and with Margaret Lindsay in British Intelligence (1940). In 1944 he underwent a spinal operation to relieve his chronic arthritic condition.[15]
From 1945 to 1946, he appeared in three films for RKO produced by Val Lewton: Isle of the Dead, The Body Snatcher, and Bedlam. In a 1946 interview with Louis Berg of the Los Angeles Times, Karloff discussed his three-picture deal with RKO, his reasons for leaving Universal Pictures
and working with producer Lewton. Karloff left Universal because he
thought the Frankenstein franchise had run its course. The last
installment in which he appeared—House of Frankenstein—was what
he called a "'monster clambake,' with everything thrown in—Frankenstein,
Dracula, a hunchback, and a 'man-beast' that howled in the night. It
was too much. Karloff thought it was ridiculous and said so." Berg
continues, "Mr. Karloff has great love and respect for Mr. Lewton as the
man who rescued him from the living dead and restored, so to speak, his
soul."[16]
During this period, Karloff was also a frequent guest on radio programmes, whether it was starring in Arch Oboler's Chicago-based Lights Out productions (most notably the episode "Cat Wife") or spoofing his horror image with Fred Allen or Jack Benny. In 1949, he was the host and star of Starring Boris Karloff, a radio and television anthology series for the ABC broadcasting network.
An enthusiastic performer, he returned to the Broadway stage in the original production of Arsenic and Old Lace in 1941, in which he played a homicidal gangster enraged to be frequently mistaken for Karloff. Although Frank Capra cast Raymond Massey in the 1944 film,
which was shot in 1941, while Karloff was still appearing in the role
on Broadway, Karloff reprised the role on television with Tony Randall and Tom Bosley in a 1962 production on the Hallmark Hall of Fame. Somewhat less successful was his work in J. B. Priestley's play The Linden Tree. He also appeared as Captain Hook in the play Peter Pan with Jean Arthur. He was nominated for a Tony Award for his work opposite Julie Harris in The Lark, by the French playwright Jean Anouilh, about Joan of Arc, which was reprised on Hallmark Hall of Fame.
In later years, he hosted and acted in a number of television series, most notably Thriller, Out Of This World, and The Veil,
but the last of these was never actually broadcast, and only came to
light in the 1990s. In the 1960s, Karloff appeared in several films for American International Pictures, including The Comedy of Terrors, The Raven, and The Terror, the latter two directed by Roger Corman, and Die, Monster, Die! He also starred in Michael Reeves's second feature film, The Sorcerers, in 1966.
During the 1950s, he appeared on British television in the series Colonel March of Scotland Yard, in which he portrayed John Dickson Carr's fictional detective Colonel March, who was known for solving apparently impossible crimes.
Karloff, along with H. V. Kaltenborn, was a regular panelist on the NBC game show, Who Said That?, which aired between 1948 and 1955. Later, as a guest on NBC's The Gisele MacKenzie Show, Karloff sang "Those Were the Good Old Days" from Damn Yankees, while Gisele MacKenzie performed the solo, "Give Me the Simple Life". On The Red Skelton Show, Karloff guest starred along with horror actor Vincent Price in a parody of Frankenstein, with Red Skelton as "Klem Kadiddle Monster." In 1966, Karloff also appeared with Robert Vaughn and Stefanie Powers in the spy series The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.,
in the episode "The Mother Muffin Affair," Karloff performed in drag as
the titular character. That same year, he also played an Indian Maharajah on the installment of the adventure series The Wild Wild West titled "The Night of the Golden Cobra". In 1967, he played an eccentric Spanish professor who believes himself to be Don Quixote in a whimsical episode of I Spy titled "Mainly on the Plains."
In the mid-1960s, he gained a late-career surge of American
popularity when he narrated the made-for-television animated film of Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and also provided the voice of the Grinch, although the song "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" was sung by the American voice actor Thurl Ravenscroft. The film was first broadcast on CBS-TV in 1966. Karloff later received a Grammy Award for "Best Recording For Children" after the story was released as a record.[17] Because Ravenscroft (who never met Karloff in the course of their work on the show)[18] was uncredited for his contribution to How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, his performance of the song was often mistakenly attributed to Karloff.
In 1968, he starred in Targets, a film directed by Peter Bogdanovich,
featuring two separate stories that converge into one. In one, a
disturbed young man kills his family, then embarks on a killing spree.
In the other, a famous horror-film actor contemplates then confirms his
retirement, agreeing to one last appearance at a drive-in cinema.
Karloff starred as the retired horror film actor, Byron Orlok, a thinly
disguised version of himself; Orlok was facing an end of life crisis,
which he resolved through a confrontation with the gunman at the
drive-in cinema.
In 1968, he played occult expert Professor Marsh in a British production titled The Crimson Cult (Curse of the Crimson Altar), which was the last Karloff film to be released during his lifetime.
He ended his career by appearing in four low-budget Mexican horror films: The Snake People, The Incredible Invasion, Fear Chamber, and House of Evil. This was a package deal with Mexican producer Luis Enrique Vergara. Karloff's scenes were directed by Jack Hill
and shot back-to-back in Los Angeles in the spring of 1968. The films
were then completed in Mexico. All four were released posthumously, with
the last, The Incredible Invasion, not released until 1971, two years after Karloff's death.
Cauldron of Blood, shot in Spain in 1967 and co-starring Viveca Lindfors, was also released after Karloff's death.
While shooting his final films, Karloff suffered from emphysema. Only half of one lung was still functioning and he required oxygen between takes.
Spoken word recordings and horror anthologies
He recorded the title role of Shakespeare's Cymbeline for the Shakespeare Recording Society (Caedmon Audio). The recording was originally released in 1962. A download of his performance is available from audible.com. He is also recorded the narration for Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra under Mario Rossi.
Records he made for the children's market included Three Little Pigs and Other Fairy Stories, Tales of the Frightened (volume 1 and 2), Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories and, with Cyril Ritchard and Celeste Holm, Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes,[19] and Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark.[20]
He edited several horror anthologies, commencing with Tales of Terror (Cleveland and NY: World Publishing Co, 1943)(compiled with the help of Edmond Speare).[21]
This wartime-published anthology went through at least five printings
to September 1945. It has been reprinted recently (Orange NJ: Idea Men,
2007).
Karloff's name was also attached to And the Darkness Falls (Cleveland and NY: World Publishing Co, 1946); and The Boris Karloff Horror Anthology
(London: Souvenir Press, 1965; simultaneous publication in Canada -
Toronto: The Ryerson Press; US pbk reprint NY: Avon Books, 1965 retitled
as Boris Karloff's Favourite Horror Stories; UK pbk reprints
London: Corgi, 1969 and London: Everest, 1975, both under the original
title), though it less clear whether Karloff himself actually edited
these.
Tales of the Frightened (Belmont Books, 1963), though based on
the recordings by Karloff of the same title, and featuring his image on
the book cover, contained stories written by Michael Avallone; the second volume, Boris Karloff presents More Tales of the Frightened
contained stories authored by Robert Lory. Both Avallone and Lory
worked closely with Canadian editor and book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel,
who also ghost-edited a horror story anthology for horror film star Basil Rathbone.
Personal life
Beginning in 1940, Karloff dressed as Father Christmas every Christmas to hand out presents to physically disabled children in a Baltimore hospital.[22] He never legally changed his name to "Boris Karloff." He signed official documents "William H. Pratt, a.k.a. Boris Karloff."[23]
He was a charter member of the Screen Actors Guild,
and was especially outspoken regarding working conditions on sets that
actors were expected to deal with in the mid-1930s, some of which were
extremely hazardous. In 1931, Boris Karloff took out insurance against
premature aging that might be caused by his fright make-up.[24]
He married five times and had one child, daughter Sara Karloff, by
his fourth wife. One marriage was in 1946 right after his divorce.[25][26] At the time of his daughter's birth he was filming Son of Frankenstein, and reportedly rushed from the film set to the hospital while still in full makeup.[27] Little is otherwise known of Boris's private life.[28]
Death
His retirement was spent in England at his country cottage named Roundabout in the Hampshire village of Bramshott. He contracted bronchitis in 1968 and was hospitalized at University College Hospital.[29][30] He died of pneumonia at the King Edward VII Hospital, Midhurst, in Sussex, on 2 February 1969 at the age of 81.[31][3]
His body was cremated following a requested modest service at Guildford Crematorium, Godalming, Surrey, where he is commemorated by a plaque in the Garden of Remembrance. A memorial service was held at St Paul's, Covent Garden (the Actors' Church), London, where there is also a plaque.
Four Mexican films for which Karloff shot his scenes in Los Angeles
in 1968 were released over a two-year period posthumously. During the
run of Thriller, Karloff lent his name and likeness to a comic book for Gold Key Comics based upon the series. After Thriller was cancelled, the comic was retitled Boris Karloff's Tales of Mystery.
An illustrated likeness of Karloff continued to introduce each issue of
this publication for nearly a decade after his death; the comic lasted
until the early 1980s. In 2009, Dark Horse Comics began publishing
reprints of Boris Karloff's Tales of Mystery in a hard-bound edition.
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