Bela Lugosi

Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó, known professionally as Bela Lugosi, was a Hungarian-American actor born in 1882 in Lugos, Kingdom of Hungary, now Lugoj, Romania. The youngest of four children, he was the son of István Blaskó, a baker who later became a banker, and Paula de Vojnić. Raised in a Catholic family, Lugosi left school at age 12 to take up manual labor work. He adopted the surname Lugosi in 1903 as a tribute to his birthplace and began his stage career that same year, with his earliest documented performances coming from provincial theatres during the 1903–04 season in small roles across plays and operettas. By 1911 he had relocated to Budapest, where he performed dozens of roles at the National Theatre of Hungary between 1913 and 1919, including appearances in Shakespearean productions. Over the course of his Hungarian stage career he appeared in more than 170 productions.

During World War I, Lugosi served as a lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian Army's Imperial and Royal 43rd Infantry Regiment from 1914 to 1916, seeing action on the Russian front and receiving the Wound Medal for injuries sustained in combat. Following his return to civilian life, he entered the Hungarian silent film industry, appearing in at least ten films between 1917 and 1918 under the stage name Arisztid Olt, with his first screen appearance coming in the 1917 film Leoni Leo. His involvement in the actors' union during the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 forced him to flee the country when the government changed. He initially escaped to Vienna with his first wife, Ilona Szmik, before the two settled in Berlin, where he appeared in at least fourteen German silent films in 1920, among them Der Januskopf and Hypnose: Sklaven fremden Willens. During this period Ilona suffered a miscarriage, subsequently left Lugosi, and filed for divorce.

Lugosi departed Germany in October 1920 and arrived in New Orleans in December of that year, having worked as a crewman aboard a merchant ship. He made his way north to New York City, where immigration officers processed him at Ellis Island in March 1921. Standing six feet one inch tall and weighing 180 pounds, he initially worked as a laborer before joining New York's Hungarian immigrant theatrical community. Together with fellow expatriate Hungarian actors he formed a small stock company that toured Eastern cities performing for immigrant audiences. In 1921 he married his second wife, Ilona von Montagh, a Hungarian émigré stage actress he had previously worked with in Europe; though they lived together only briefly, their divorce was not finalized until October 1925.

Lugosi's Broadway career spanned from 1922 to 1933. He made his first English-language Broadway appearance in The Red Poppy in 1922. In 1925 he played an Arab sheik in Arabesque, which opened at the Teck Theatre in Buffalo, New York before transferring to Broadway. That same period included a five-month run in the comedy-fantasy The Devil in the Cheese. His most consequential Broadway credit came in 1927, when he was cast as Count Dracula in a stage adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel. He toured the production to the West Coast in 1928 and ultimately settled in Hollywood, later claiming to have performed the role approximately 1,000 times over his lifetime. His Broadway work also included Murder at the Vanities and additional productions through 1933.

The 1931 film version of Dracula, directed by Tod Browning and produced by Universal Pictures, brought Lugosi international recognition. He became a United States citizen on June 26, 1931, shortly after the film's release. Through the 1930s he occupied a prominent place in Hollywood horror films, co-starring with Boris Karloff in The Black Cat (1934), The Raven (1935), and Son of Frankenstein (1939), in which he played Ygor. His thick Hungarian accent and strong identification with the Dracula role significantly limited the parts available to him, and his efforts to avoid typecasting were largely unsuccessful.

Lugosi had been receiving medication for sciatic neuritis, and he developed an addiction to doctor-prescribed morphine and methadone. His drug dependence and worsening alcoholism became apparent to producers, and following Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948 his career declined sharply. He appeared primarily in low-budget films during his later years, including collaborations with director Ed Wood, among them a brief appearance in Plan 9 from Outer Space, released posthumously in 1957. Lugosi married five times and had one son, Bela G. Lugosi, with his fourth wife, Lillian. He had four grandchildren named Greg, Jeff, Tim, and Lynne, and seven great-grandchildren, none of whom he lived to meet.