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Famous Like Me > Actor > P > Vincent Price

Profile of Vincent Price on Famous Like Me

 
Name: Vincent Price  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 27th May 1911
   
Place of Birth: St. Louis, Missouri, USA
   
Profession: Actor
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia
Vincent Price on Broadway as Mr. Manningham in Angel Street, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1942.  His long run in the play kept him off screen for three years. The play was filmed twice as Gaslight, but Price did not star in either version.

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 seriocomic 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 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. 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, 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 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.

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.

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).

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. Friends said Price never recovered from her death in 1991 from breast cancer.

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.

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.

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.

House of Wax (1953)

Filmography

  • Service de Luxe (1938)
  • The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939)
  • Tower of London, The (1939)
  • The Invisible Man Returns (1940)
  • Green Hell (1940)
  • The House of the Seven Gables (1940)
  • Brigham Young - Frontiersman (1940)
  • Hudson's Bay (1941)
  • The Song of Bernadette (1943)
  • The Eve of St. Mark (1944)
  • Wilson (1944)
  • Laura (1944)
  • The Keys of the Kingdom (1944)
  • A Royal Scandal (1945)
  • Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
  • Shock (1946)
  • Dragonwyck (1946)
  • The Web (1947)
  • The Long Night (1947)
  • Moss Rose (1947)
  • Up in Central Park (1948)
  • Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) (voice only)
  • Rogues' Regiment (1948)
  • The Three Musketeers (1948)
  • The Bribe (1949)
  • Bagdad (1949)
  • The Baron of Arizona (1950)
  • Champagne for Caesar (1950)
  • Curtain Call at Cactus Creek (1950)
  • Notes on the Port of St. Francis (1951) (short subject) (narrator)
  • Adventures of Captain Fabian (1951)
  • His Kind of Woman (1951)
  • Pictura: An Adventure in Art (1951) (documentary) (narrator)
  • The Las Vegas Story (1952)
  • House of Wax (1953)
  • Crucifixion (1953) (short subject) (narrator)
  • Dangerous Mission (1954)
  • Casanova's Big Night (1954) (Cameo)
  • The Mad Magician (1954)
  • Born In Freedom: The Story of Colonel Drake (1955) (short subject)
  • Son of Sinbad (1955)
  • Serenade (1956)
  • While the City Sleeps (1956)
  • The Vagabond King (1956) (narrator)
  • The Ten Commandments (1956)
  • Eight Steps to Peace (1957) (documentary) (narrator)
  • The Story of Mankind (1957)
  • The Fly (1958)
  • House on Haunted Hill (1959)
  • The Big Circus (1959)
  • The Tingler (1959)
  • Return of the Fly (1959)
  • The Bat (1959)
  • House of Usher (1960)
  • Nefertiti, Queen of the Nile (1961)
  • Rage of the Buccaneers (1961)
  • Master of the World (1961)
  • Pit and the Pendulum (1961)
  • Naked Terror (1961) (documentary) (narrator)
  • Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962)
  • Tales of Terror (1962)
  • Convicts 4 (1962)
  • Tower of London (1962)
  • Taboos of the World (1963) (documentary) (narrator)
  • The Raven (1963)
  • Diary of a Madman (1963)
  • Beach Party (1963)
  • The Haunted Palace (1963)
  • Twice-Told Tales (1963)
  • The Comedy of Terrors (1964)
  • The Last Man on Earth (1964)
  • The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
  • Chagall (1964) (short subject) (narrator)
  • The Tomb of Ligeia (1965)
  • War-Gods of the Deep (1965)
  • Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965)
  • Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (1966)
  • The Jackals (1967)
  • The House of 1,000 Dolls (1967)
  • Spirits of the Dead (1968) (narrator in English version)
  • Witchfinder General (1968) (AKA: The Conqueror Worm)
  • More Dead Than Alive (1968)
  • Scream and Scream Again (1969)
  • The Oblong Box (1969)
  • The Trouble with Girls (1969)
  • Cry of the Banshee (1970)
  • Mooch Goes to Hollywood (1971) (Cameo)
  • The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)
  • The Beginning of the End of the World (1971) (documentary) (narrator)
  • The Hilarious House of Frightenstein (1971) (Canadian) (cameo: narrator/host)
  • An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe (1972) (narrator)
  • The Aries Computer (1972)
  • Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972)
  • Theatre of Blood (1973)
  • It's Not the Size That Counts (1974)
  • Madhouse (1974)
  • The Devil's Triangle (1974) (documentary) (narrator)
  • Journey Into Fear (1975)
  • Alice Cooper: Welcome to My Nightmare (1975) (documentary)
  • The Butterfly Ball (1976) (voice)
  • Days of Fury (1978) (documentary) (narrator)
  • Scavenger Hunt (1979)
  • The Monster Club (1980)
  • Pogo for President: 'I Go Pogo' (1980) (voice)
  • Vincent (1982) (short subject) (voice)
  • House of the Long Shadows (1983)
  • Bloodbath at the House of Death (1984)
  • Dracula, the Great Undead (1985) (documentary) (narrator)
  • The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo (1985) (voice)
  • The Nativity (1986) (short subject) (voice)
  • The Great Mouse Detective (1986) (voice)
  • The Whales of August (1987)
  • The Offspring (1987)
  • Vincent Price: The Sinister Image (1988) (documentary)
  • Dead Heat (1988)
  • Don't Scream It's Only a Movie (1989) (documentary) (narrator)
  • Catchfire (1990)
  • Edward Scissorhands (1990)
  • Preminger: Anatomy of a Filmmaker (1991) (documentary)
  • Arabian Knight (1995) (voice) (previously recorded audio used)


This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Vincent Price