Dwight Frye

Dwight Iliff Frye, born Fry on February 22, 1899, in Salina, Kansas, was an American actor whose career spanned both stage and screen. He died on November 7, 1943, of a heart attack while traveling by bus in Hollywood, at the age of 44, just days before he was set to begin work on the biopic Wilson. He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, with a funeral service held at Utter-McKinley Mortuary in West Hollywood.

Frye's early training was in music, and he first performed publicly as a concert pianist before transitioning to the stage. During the 1920s he established himself as a stage actor, frequently appearing in comedies. His Broadway career ran from 1922 to 1934 and included productions such as Ink, Mima, The Queen's Husband, Keeper of the Keys, and Queer People. In 1924, he took on the role of the Son in a staging of Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author.

Although Frye appeared in minor comedic parts in silent films, the arrival of sound cinema redirected his career toward villainous and mentally unbalanced characters. He became closely identified with this type of role following his portrayal of the madman Renfield in Tod Browning's Dracula in 1931. That same year he played Fritz, the hunchbacked assistant, in Frankenstein, and Wilmer Cook in the first film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. In 1933 he appeared in The Vampire Bat as Herman, a half-wit suspected of murder, and had a featured role as a reporter in The Invisible Man. He also appeared in The Crime of Dr. Crespi in 1935.

In Bride of Frankenstein, also released in 1935, Frye played Karl. His role was originally considerably larger, incorporating a subplot in which Karl kills a Burgomaster played by E. E. Clive, but those scenes were cut to reduce the film's running time and satisfy censors. Only still photographs of the deleted footage survive, included in a Universal Studios DVD release. Frye returned to the Frankenstein series in The Ghost of Frankenstein in 1942 and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man in 1943, playing prominent townspeople in each; a separate appearance in Son of Frankenstein in 1939 was removed before the film's release. He also appeared in two James Cagney films during the 1930s: The Doorway to Hell in 1930, in which he played a hit man, and Something to Sing About in 1937, in which he played a fussy hairdresser.

In the early 1940s Frye divided his time between film work and stage productions that ranged from comedies to musicals, including a stage version of Dracula. During World War II he contributed to the war effort by working nights as a tool designer for Lockheed Aircraft.

Frye's cultural legacy extended beyond his lifetime. The American rock band Alice Cooper recorded a tribute, "The Ballad of Dwight Fry," intentionally omitting the final letter of his surname, for their 1971 album Love It to Death. In live performances the song was staged with Cooper in a straitjacket. Devil Doll's 1990 album Eliogabalus featured Frye's photographed likeness, and the 1991 SNFU compilation The Last of the Big Time Suspenders used artwork depicting Frye as his Renfield character on its front cover.