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Vincent Price

Vincent Price: Encyclopedia - Vincent Price

Vincent Leonard Price, Jr. (May 27, 1911 – October 25, 1993), born in St. Louis, Missouri to Vincent Leonard Price and Marguerite Willcox Price, was an American film actor. He is most well remembered for his roles in a series of low-budget horror films where his distinctive voice and serio-comic attitude were well used. In such films, his tall physique and polished urbane manner made him something of ...

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Vincent Price - Filmography

Vincent Price, Vincent Price - Filmography

Vincent Price: Encyclopedia - Vincent Price

Vincent Price

Vincent Leonard Price, Jr. (May 27, 1911 – October 25, 1993), born in St. Louis, Missouri to Vincent Leonard Price and Marguerite Willcox Price, was an American film actor. He is most well remembered for his roles in a series of low-budget horror films where his distinctive voice and serio-comic attitude were well used. In such films, his tall physique and polished urbane manner made him something of an American counterpart to the older Boris Karloff.

His father was president of the National Candy Company. Price Jr. was educated at Yale-where he was a member of Alpha Sigma Phi Fraternity-and the Courtauld Institute, London in art history and fine art. He became interested in theater in the 1930s, appearing professionally on stage from 1935.

He made his film debut in 1938 with Service de Luxe and established himself as a competent player, notably in Laura (1944), directed by Otto Preminger. He acted as Joseph Smith, Jr. in the movie Brigham Young (1940).

In the 1950s he moved into horror films, enjoying the role in the successful curiosity House of Wax (1953), the first 3-D film to land in the year's top ten at the North American box office, and then the classic monster movie The Fly (1958). The six-four actor also starred in the original House on Haunted Hill (1959) as eccentric millionaire Fredrick Loren. (The actor playing the same character in the 1999 remake was made to not only resemble, but was renamed after Price.)

In the 1960s, he had a number of low-budget successes with Roger Corman and AIP including the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1965). These were followed by numerous other roles throughout the 1960s where he played characters in horror films that were often closely modelled on the Corman Poe films. He has also appeared in The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) and Theatre of Blood (1973), where he created a series of campy tongue-in-cheek villains.

He often spoke of his joy at playing "Egghead" on the popular Batman television series. Another of his co-stars, Yvonne Craig (Batgirl), often said Price was her favorite co-star. Vincent, after a take was printed, started throwing eggs at Adam West and Burt Ward and when asked to stop replied "With a full artillery? Not a chance!", causing an eggfight on the soundstage.

He greatly reduced his film work from around 1975, as horror itself suffered a slump, and increased his narrative and voice work. For example, Price's voiceover is heard on Alice Cooper's first solo album Welcome to My Nightmare; in Michael Jackson's semi-creepy music video, Thriller; and, in one of his last major and one of his favourite feature film roles, as the voice of Professor Ratigan in Walt Disney Pictures' The Great Mouse Detective. He also starred for a year in the early '70's in a syndicated daily radio program, Tales of the Unexplained which was produced by voice actor Mel Blanc's company, Mel Blanc Audiomedia.

In the summer of 1977 he began performing, as Oscar Wilde, in the one man stage play Diversions and Delights. Written by John Gay and directed by Joe Hardy, the play is set in a Parisian theater, on a night about one year before Wilde's death. In an attempt to earn some much-needed money, he is speaking to the audience about his life, his works and, in the second act, about his love for Lord Alfred Douglas, which led to his downfall. The original tour of the play was a success in every city that it played, except for New York City. In the summer of 1979 he performed it at the Tabor Opera House in Leadville, Colorado on the same stage that Wilde had spoken to the miners about art some 96 years before. Price would, eventually, perform the play worldwide and to many, including his daughter Victoria, it was the best acting that he ever did.

From 1981 to 1989, he hosted the PBS television series Mystery!. His last significant film work was as the inventor in Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands (1990).

The blue-eyed Price was married three times. Price fathered a son named Vincent, Jr. with his first wife, a former actress named Edith. Price and his second wife Mary donated hundreds of works of art and a large monetary gift to East Los Angeles College in the early 1960s in order to endow the Vincent and Mary Price Gallery there, which stands to this day. Price's daughter Victoria was born to the couple in 1962. Price's last marriage was to the actress Coral Browne who appeared with him in Theatre Of Blood (1973). People have said theirs was one of Hollywood's great love stories; he converted to Catholicism for her, and she became a U.S. citizen for him (according to his daughter, Price became disillusioned with the faith after her 1991 death, from which friends say he never recovered).

In his later years, Price spoke out against modern horror films that glorified violence, pointing out that his films were harmless spoofs by comparison.

Price was also a noted gourmet cook and art collector. From 1962 to 1971, Sears, Roebuck offered the Vincent Price Collection of Fine Art, selling about 50,000 pieces of fine art to the general public. Price selected and comissioned works for the collection, including works by Rembrant, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dali. [1]

A lifelong smoker, Vincent Price died of lung cancer on October 25, 1993, at 82 years of age, just six days before Halloween and, eerily, on the night before his biography, Conversations With Vincent, directed by and featuring Tim Burton, was first aired on the Arts and Entertainment Network. The broadcast began with a note by A&E was dedicating the broadcast to his memory. It was never distributed for home use due to a conflict over certain rights. He had also long suffered from emphysema and Parkinson's disease, which had forced his role in Edward Scissorhands to be much smaller than intended.

Vincent Twice Vincent Twice was a Price lookalike character on Sesame Street.

In 1999 a frank and detailed biography of Vincent Price, written by his daughter Victoria Price, was published by St Martin's Griffin Press.