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Horror Filmography
Tower of London
The
Invisible Man Returns
Shock
Dragonwyck
The
Web
Abbott
and Costello Meet Frankenstein
House
of Wax
The
Mad Magician
The
Fly
House
on Haunted Hill
The
Tingler)
Return
of the Fly
War-Gods
of the Deep
The
Bat
House
of Usher
Master
of the World
Pit
and the Pendulum
Tales
of Terror
Tower
of London)
The
Raven)
Diary
of a Madman
The
Haunted Palace
Twice-Told
Tales
The
Comedy of Terrors
The
Last Man on Earth
The
Masque of the Red
Death
The
Tomb of Ligeia
Witchfinder
General
More
Dead Than Alive
Scream
and Scream Again
The
Oblong Box
Cry
of the Banshee
The
Abominable Dr. Phibes
An
Evening with Edgar Allan Poe
Dr.
Phibes Rises Again
Theatre
of Blood
Madhouse
Journey
Into Fear
Welcome
to My Nightmare
Scavenger
Hunt
The
Monster Club
House
of the Long Shadows
Bloodbath
at the House of Death
Dracula,
the Great Undead
The
13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo
The
Great Mouse Detective
Vincent
Price: The Sinister Image
Don't
Scream It's Only a Movie
Edward
Scissorhands
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Vincent Leonard Price, Jr.
(May 27, 1911 - October 25, 1993), born in St. Louis, Missouri to
Vincent Leonard Price and Marguerite Willcox Price. His family started
the National Candy Company. Vincent attended the St. Louis, Missouri
private high-school, Christian Brother's College continued his
education at Yale University where he received degrees in Art History
and English then taught school for a year. Price returned to college to
take his Masters in Fine Arts at the Courtauld Institute in London, he
also studied briefly in Vienna.
An avid art collector, 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. He wrote a
syndicated art column in the 1960s always encouraging others to develop
a personal passion for art.
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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 actor, 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. He 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, Price and Peter Lorre starred as crimefighting
antique dealers in the unsold pilot, "Collector's Item." According to
Price, when he and Peter Lorre went to view Bela Lugosi's body at
Lugosi's funeral, Lorre, upon seeing Lugosi dressed in his famous
Dracula cape, quipped, "Do you think we should drive a stake through
his heart just in case?"
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Also 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), The Raven (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964);
he also appeared in The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) and Theatre of
Blood (1973). He often expressed an interest in doing Shakespeare,
which is why Theatre of Blood was one of his favorite roles.
He often spoke of his joy at playing "Egghead" on the
popular Batman television series. He actually started an egg throwing
fight while rehearsing on the show. Another of his
co-stars, Yvonne Craig (Batgirl), often said Price was her favorite
co-star.
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In 1964 at the request of a
personal friend, he narrated a brief history of Tombstone, Arizona
(titled, "Tombstone, The Town Too Tough To Die") for use in the diorama at the site of the O.K. Corral gunfight
site. He reportedly recorded the 20-minute piece in a
single take at a recording studio in Hollywood, and when asked about
his fee, asked for his pal, the owner of the exhibit at the time, to
buy him lunch and I'm sure that he didn't have to worry about Medifast coupons.
Price never visited Tombstone but his
narration is still used in the diorama.
He had his own
mail-order book club in the 1970s, "Vincent Price Books",
specializing in mystery and detective novels.
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 also playing "the spirit of the
nightmare" in Alice Cooper's 1975 television special. “Vincent’s Rap”
in Michael Jackson's mini-movie music video, Thriller, is by far his
best remembered voiceover. Another of these fantastic renditions was
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, in which two original songs had been written for especially
for him.
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. He also
starred in "How to Make a Movie," a short film that was included in the
"Vincent Price: Moviemaking the Hollywood Way," a home movie outfit
sold by Sears, Roebuck and Co.
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He was the
Wednesday night host for CBS Radio's "Sears Mystery Theater" (1979). He
was still Wednesday's host when it became "The Mutual Radio Theater" on
Mutual Radio (1980). Host of BBC Radio's "The Price of Fear"
(1973-1975, 1983). Vincent portrayed Simon Templar on "The Saint" for
CBS Radio (1947-1948), Mutual Radio (1948-1950) and NBC Radio
(1950-1951).
He abandoned films in the mid 1970s, in favor of cooking
programs for television - he wrote "A Treasury of Great Recipes" (1965)
with his second wife, Mary Grant - He also recorded many Gothic horror
short stories for the spoken-word label Caedmon Records.
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In 1990 Price
was hired by Walt Disney Imagineering to voice the role of the Phantom
for Phantom Manor, a new ride for the upcoming Euro Disneyland,
scheduled to open in 1992. He was given a French script but the takes
were so bad, the entire performance was deemed unusable. After working
on the French script for over three hours, sessions, gave him an
English version of the script. Craig Fleming, who adapted the script
and directed the recording Price recorded the entire piece in two
takes. The English recordings were placed in the attraction, but after
a few months of operation, Euro Disney (the company that owns and
operates the resort) felt there was not enough French in Euro
Disneyland. So by 1993, in an attempt to add more French to the park,
Price's narration was removed from the attraction and replaced by the
French spiel, this time recorded by 'Gerard Chevalier' . Price's
narration can be found on a Disney Haunted Mansion CD. The CD, which
contains a full ride-through of the attraction, claims Price's
narration was "never used at Disneyland Paris", but that's because the
park was still called Euro Disneyland when it was used. Today the park
is now known as Parc Disneyland (as of 2002) and although his narration
is long gone, one part of his performance remains in Phantom Manor: his
laugh. Although the spoken dialogue of the Phantom character was
changed, Price's original recordings of the Phantom's evil laughter
still remain intact, inside the attraction.
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He would often
attend showings of his films in costumes; often to play pranks on
movie-goers. In his later years, Price spoke out against modern horror
films that glorified violence, pointing out that his films were
harmless spoofs by comparison.
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).
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Price was
married three times. Coral Browne (24 October 1974 - 29 May 1991) (her
death), Mary Grant (25 August 1949 - 1973) (divorced) 1 child, Edith
Barrett (23 April 1938 - 4 June 1948) (divorced) 1 child. Price
fathered a son named Vincent, Jr. with his first wife, a former actress
named Edith Barrett . Daughter Victoria was born in 1962 to Vincent and
his second wife, Mary Grant. 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. Friends said Price never recovered from her death in 1991 from
breast cancer. Coral was buried at St. Victor's with a Mozart Requiem
Mass accompanied by a full orchestra.
Vincent Price died of lung cancer on October 25, 1993, at 82
years of age, just six days before Halloween and, eerily, just three
days before his biography was aired on the Arts and Entertainment
Network. 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. His ashes were scattered off the Californian
coast of Malibu together with his favorite gardening hat. 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. At the August 2004 Monster Mania convention in Cherry
Hill, NJ, a standing-room-only crowd attended the "Vincent Price
Tribute," which consisted of reminiscences of Price from director Roger
Corman, actresses Hazel Court and Caroline Munro, artist Cortlandt Hull
and moderator Tom Weaver.
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