Bela Lugosi

 

"Every actor's greatest ambition is to create his own, definite and original role, a character with which he will always be identified.  In my case, that role was Dracula."

Bela Lugosi was born Bela Ferenc Dezso Blasko in Hungary on October 20, 1882.  He was the youngest of four children to father Istvan, a baker turned banker, and mother Paula de Vojnic.  When Bela was just 12 years old, he gave up school to help support his family, but he had already set his sights on a career on stage.

By the time he was 20, Lugosi had already carved out a name for himself, having appeared in more than 170 stage productions.  With the onset of World War I however, he'd emigrate first to Germany, then later to New Orleans, eventually becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen.  

Lugosi first played Count Dracula in a 1927 Broadway adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel.  He followed the play out to the West Coast, where he caught the eye of Universal Studios, who cast him in the role he'd be most famously known for.  Dracula, directed by Tod Browning, was released in 1931, cementing Lugosi's role as a horror screen legend.  Despite a slew of horror films that followed, Lugosi only played Dracula in one subsequent film - 1948's Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Bela Lugosi died of a heart attack on August 16th, 1956.  He was 73 years old.  In a funeral service conducted at Los Angeles's Holy Cross Cemetery (oh the irony), Lugosi was laid to rest wearing a replica of his famous Dracula costume.

Happy Halloween!

Trivia

• If you want to learn more about Bela Lugosi, take a voyage to Amazon.  Its all in books.
  
  
• At the time of his passing, Lugosi was working with Director Ed Wood on the film that would come to be known as Plan 9 From Outer Space.  Wood subsequently served as a pallbearer at Lugosi's funeral.
  
  
• As noted above, Lugosi was buried in a replica of his famous Dracula cape.  In 2019, his son, Bela George Lugosi, donated the original to the museum for the Academy of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.  A swatch of this cape is also on display at the Ripley's Believe it or Not Odditorium in Ocean City, Maryland.
  
  
• Lugosi was a noted stamp collector, who would himself later adorn two U.S. stamps.
  
  
• Similarly, there are two flowers named after the actor - the Bela Lugosi daylily and the Dracula-Bela Lugosi orchid.