The Mondo-Esoterica Guide to

Vincent Price

Biography

Vincent Price was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1911 to a family who had made their wealth in the food industry. His interest was art and in 1927 he spent five weeks touring the great art galleries of Europe, he persued the passion to Yale where he studied art history. While at University he toured Europe as part of Yale's Glee Club and gained a passion for theatrical acting so after graduating in 1933 spent a while trying unsucessfully to get accepted by New York theatrical agencies. When it became clear that this was not going to work out he travelled to Europe to continue his art education at the University of London where he rediscovered his love of the theatre and was able to finally make his professional stage debut in 1935 in Maurine Dallas Watkins' Chicago, playing a policemen - cast for little more than his American accent. He moved up quickly and gained positive notices as Prince Albert in Laurence Housman's Victoria Regina and in 1936 was able to play the same role alongside Helen Hayes in the play's 18 month Broadway run as well as a touring program.

In 1938, Price signed a contract with Universal Studios and made his film debut as the supporting lead in light comedy Service de Luxe (1938). More telling of the direction his career would later take were roles as the Duke of Clarence alongside Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff in Rowland V. Lee's horror tinged Tower of London (1939) and as the transparent Radcliffe in The Invisible Man Returns (1940). Horror however was not a path he seemed destined to go down at this time and after leaving Universal for Twenieth Century Fox, he played a variety of roles - his well spoken aristocratic tones serving him well in historical parts such as King Charles II in Hudson's Bay (1941) and Mormon founder Joseph Smith in Brigham Young (1940).

Another successful Broadway run followed as the villaneous Jack Manningham in Patrick Hamilton's Gas Light (titled Angel Street in the US) after which Price invariably found himself in villan or at least villaneous parts, appearing in a number of Fox's Films Noirs titles including Laura (1944), Shock (1946) and The Long Night (1947) as well as playing the aristocratic Nicholas Van Ryn in the dark drama Dragonwyck (1946). His contract with Fox expired in 1947 and he freelanced playing among other roles Cardinal Richelieu in MGM's Three Musketeers (1948), a Mesopotamian Prince in the Arabian adventure Bagdad (1949) and headlining as the crooked James Addison Reavis in Samuel Fuller's The Baron of Arizona (1950). Despite all the parts however, he had not been able to establish a solid name for himself on the big screen and looked to supplement his roles with small screen work, radio parts (he had a long stint playing Simon Templar in The Saint) and with a return to the stage in a touring production of George Bernard Shaw's Don Juan in Hell.

In 1953 Price was offered another big stage part, in the comedy My Three Angels but before he could accept this he was contacted by Warner Brothers to appear in a horror film - House of Wax (1953), the first Hollywood picture to be shot in the newly developed 3-D process. Price chose the horror picture and had to endure a gruelling shoot including a three-hour make-up session before every day of filming and a number of elaborate stunts that the director insisted could not be performed using a stuntman. The film proved a huge success and kick started a 3-D boom in the early 1950s. Price was quickly signed up by Columbia to all but reprise the part in The Mad Magician (1954), another 3-D horror with Price seeking revenge on those who have wronged him.

Despite his obvious prowess in horror roles, it would be another four years before he eventually became a horror star; instead the mid-1950s offered Price an ecclectic selection of roles from Fritz Lang's Film Noir While the City Sleeps (1956) to Cecil B. DeMille's epic Ten Commandments (1956) playing the Egyptian master builder Baka. Returning to the theatre he starred in the comedy Black-Eyed Susan but received poor reviews and would leave the stage for over a decade. The only real success that he found was on television where he competed on the popular game show The $64,000 Challenge answering questions on art to finally walk away with the grand prize. This helped to establish Price as something of an authority on art and parallel to his film career he co-founded the Los Angeles Modern Institute of Art, would lecture on the arts and his other passion cooking (on which he wrote several books and had a television series in Britain) and was employed by catalogue company Sears-Roebuck to buy art treasures with a $1 million budget which they promoted as the Vincent Price Collection of Fine Art.

Price's film career finally focused on horror from 1958, beginning with a role in sci-fi/horror The Fly (1958) playing the brother of mutated scientist Andre Delambre and returning quickly in the same part in Return of the Fly (1959). He was hired by William Castle, notorious for his use of "gimmicks" in promoting his films, to appear in the more traditional, if somewhat tongue-in-cheek, horror House on Haunted Hill (1959) and the science fiction themed The Tingler (1959).

His most enduring part however came at the hands of director Roger Corman. Working for independent distributors American International Pictures, he was reeling out pairs of extremely low budget pictures when he managed to persuade his producers to put up double their normal funding to allow him to create a colourful gothic horror based on the (public domain) writings of Edgar Allan Poe. He got his funds and spent most of them securing Price for the leading role in what would come to be titled The Fall of the House of Usher (1960). Corman was looking to captialise on Price's renouned intellegence and his reputation for villaneous roles and saw in him the ideal casting for the highly ambiguous Roderick Usher. The film proved a big success for AIP and they quickly comissioned a second film in the same formula, Pit and the Pendulum (1961).

AIP's next part for Price saw him cast in the Nemo-esque leading role in their Jules Verne inspired Master of the World (1961) - an attempt to cash in on the release of Columbia Film's big budget Mysterious Island (1961). It was perhaps inspired by this part, along with his earlier work for DeMille that saw Price travel to Italy in the same year to appear in the Ancient Egyptian Peplum Nefertiti, regina del Nilo (1961) and alongside Ricardo Montalban in swashbuckler Gordon, il pirata nero (1961).

On his return to the US, Corman, working away from AIP, remade one of Price's earliest films Tower of London with the actor now upgraded to the leading part and clearly relishing the Shakespearean text. With the popularity of the first entries, more gothic horrors followed from AIP including the light hearted The Raven (1963) and The Comedy of Terrors (1964) which allowed Price to appear alongside his earlier co-stars Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff. Roger Corman wrapped up his contributions to the AIP gothic horror series with English lensed Tomb of Ligeia (1964) and the highly impressive Masque of the Red Death (1964) that ranks as one of the very best horror films of the decade. At the same time Price returned to Italy to star in The Last Man on Earth (1964) based on a novel by Richard Matheson - the part was not particularly well suited to the actor and the film's obvious low budget and attempts to pass off Italian locations as an American city meant that it performed poorly in the US markets.

The next four years would provide very poor material for Price and serve to prove that he was best suited to horror. AIP still had offers - casting him in another low budget adventure film in the Verne mould, The City Under the Sea (1965) and in a spy movie spoof Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965). He would subsequently travel to Italy to film the sequel, Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bomb (1966) which in a unique piece of money saving was simulataneously being filmed as Le spie vengono dal semifreddo for the Italian markets, featuring different actors as the heros (the popular comedy double act Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia) and a different storyline, although Price himself did appear in both prints. Italian director Mario Bava, best known for his seminal horror work, helmed the production but showed none of his usual flair and the end result in either version is considered the director's worst work. Continuing to travel for work Price took a leading role in South African Western, The Jackals (1967) and in Harry Alan Towers' Spanish thriller La casa de las mil muñecas (1967) before returning to the US to appear in American Western More Dead Than Alive (1968) .

In 1968, the small British film company Tigon, partnered with AIP to produce Witchfinder General (1968), set during the terrors of the 17th Century witch trials. A young British director Michael Reeves was signed to write and direct the film he planned to use Donald Pleasence in the leading role. When AIP became co-production partners they insisted that Price be cast, against the wishes of Reeves who considered his recent cinematic performances too 'tongue-in-cheek' for this very serious production. The actor and director clashed several times during the filming with Reeves making his opposition to the casting of the actor very clear. The production was completed however and Price would later describe the role as one of his very best. The film gained considerable notoriety in Britain for its vivid and unrelenting violence, in the States, AIP retitled the film Conqueror Worm to try and link it to their earlier Poe series and it proved a successful, if largely unnoticed, release.

AIP moved to capitalise on the success of Witchfinder General and reprise the successes of their Poe series by hiring Reeves to direct Price in a straight (if somewhat less controversial) gothic horror The Oblong Box (1969). Tragically, Reeves died during pre-production although the resulting film, directed by Gordon Hessler is certainly one of the best gothic horrors of the late 1960s and paired Price for the first time with British horror star Christopher Lee. AIP continued their British productions with Hessler directing Price in Cry of the Banshee (1970) and in Scream and Scream Again (1970), a co-production with British horror producers Amicus. This film promised the first on-screen pairing of Price, Lee and Peter Cushing but the trio never share any screen time and the British stars in particular have only very brief appearances in the messily scripted film.

The traditional horror films that had proved so successful in the 1960s, would by 1970, start to be seen as tired and dated. A flood of new generation films both in Europe and the US, featuring much younger casts and vivid blood and nudity were beginning to make their mark on the genre and studios that had for a long time traded on gothic horrors, such as Hammer Films, tried to update their products to appeal to younger audiences, often resorting to shoehorned comedy (most evident in Hammer's dire Horror of Frankenstein (1970)). AIP also tried to create a comic horror film but with a lot more success and the resulting Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) is often ranked as one of the best horror comedy productions. Price gets an even more eccentric part than normal, playing a revenge-seeking murderer who can talk only via an external apparatus and kills his victims in the style of the Plagues of Egypt. A less effective sequel Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972) followed, along with a much more enjoyable independent British film, Theater of Blood (1973), that lifted the basic premise but with Price now playing a scorned theatre actor who murders his critics in Shakespeare inspired ways.

Madhouse (1974) was another AIP/Amicus co-production with Price playing a horror actor who might also be a killer. The film had a lot of potential, with Price getting to play an exaggerated version of himself and sharing a number of scenes with Peter Cushing, but the end result is overlong and uninspired. It would be the end of Price's near continual run of films since the late 1950s and instead he returned to television (including a long run hosting the popular PBS Mystery series) and stage work, creating a one-man show called Diversions and Delights, playing a dying Oscar Wilde - he toured extensively from 1977 with the play to great acclaim. His distinctive voice became familiar to a new generation, appearing in the music of Alice Cooper (Welcome to My Nightmare) and Michael Jackson (Thriller) and in the animated film The Great Mouse Detective (1986) and animated series 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo (1985) playing the self-parody role of Vincent Van Ghoul.

Inevitably a return to horror would follow with a trio of British horror pictures - The Monster Club (1980) was a last attempt by producer Milton Subotsky to revitalise the Amicus brand with a traditional style horror anthology, co-starring Universal era horror star Keith Carradine (with whom this was Price's first on-screen genre meeting). Cult exploitation director Pete Walker cast Price and Carradine along with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in faux-gothic horror House of the Long Shadows (1983) and he would also appear in the spoof horror Bloodbath at the House of Death (1984). His last major film part came in the touching drama The Whales of August (1987) alongside Bette Davis and Lillian Gish and his final appearance was at the hands of one of the many film-makers he had inspired, Tim Burton, who cast him as The Inventor in Edward Scissorhands (1990). The role was severely limited by Price's increasing illness - he was suffering from Parkinsons disease and lung cancer and died in October 1993.

DVD Reviews: Films starring Vincent Price

Links

• IMDB entry

All text in this page written by Timothy Young - March 2010.
Text from this review not to be used without authorization.

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