Background and career
Vincent Leonard Price Jr. (May 27, 1911 – October 25, 1993) was an American actor, known to film audiences for his work in the horror genre, mostly portraying villains. He appeared on stage, television, and radio, and in more than 100 films. Price has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for motion pictures and one for television.
After varied stage work, including a stint with the Mercury Theatre, Price's first film role was as a leading man in the 1938 comedy Service de Luxe. He became a character actor, appearing in The Song of Bernadette (1943), Laura (1944), The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Dragonwyck (1946), The Three Musketeers (1948) and The Ten Commandments (1956). He established himself in the horror genre with roles in House of Wax (1953), The Fly (1958), House on Haunted Hill (1959), Return of the Fly (1959), The Tingler (1959), The Last Man on Earth (1964), Witchfinder General (1968), The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), and Theatre of Blood (1973). He collaborated with Roger Corman on a series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, including House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Haunted Palace (1963), and The Masque of the Red Death (1964). Price appeared in the television series Batman as Egghead. Vincent Price voiced the villainous mastermind Professor Ratigan in Disney's full-length 26th animated feature film The Great Mouse Detective (1986), and appeared in the drama The Whales of August (1987), which earned him an Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male nomination. Price's final film was as ZigZag in Arabian Knight/ The Thief and the Cobbler. For his contributions to cinema, he received lifetime achievement or special tribute awards from Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films; Fantasporto; Bram Stoker Awards; and Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Price narrated animated films, radio dramas, and documentaries, and provided the narration in Michael Jackson's song "Thriller". For his voice work in Great American Speeches (1959), Price was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album. Price was an art collector and arts consultant, with a degree in art history. He lectured and wrote books on art. The Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College is named in his honor. Price was a gourmet cook and cookbook author.
Vincent Leonard Price Jr. was born on May 27, 1911, in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest of the four children of Vincent Leonard Price, president of the National Candy Company, and his wife Marguerite Cobb (née Wilcox) Price. His grandfather was Vincent Clarence Price, who invented "Dr. Price's Baking Powder", the first cream of tartar-based baking powder, and it secured the family's fortune. Price was of Welsh and English descent and was a descendant, via his paternal grandmother, of Peregrine White, the first child born in colonial Massachusetts, being born on the Mayflower while it was in Provincetown Harbor in Massachusetts. Price attended the St. Louis Country Day School, and took a summer course at Milford Academy in Milford, Connecticut. In 1933, he graduated with a degree in English and a minor in art history from Yale University, where he worked on the campus humor magazine The Yale Record. After teaching for a year, he entered The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, intending to study for a master's degree in fine arts. Instead he was drawn to the theater, first appearing on stage professionally in 1935 in the play Chicago at the Gate Theatre in London. Next he introduced the role of Prince Albert in Laurence Housman's play Victoria Regina, also at the Gate Theatre in 1935. Later that year he moved to New York City to reprise the role of Prince Albert in the Broadway production of Victoria Regina, opposite Helen Hayes in the title role of Queen Victoria. He played the role for two seasons at the Broadhurst Theatre, through June 1937. In 1938 he appeared in productions of The Shoemaker's Holiday and Heartbreak House with Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre company. From 1941 to 1942, Price played Mr. Manningham in Angel Street, the Broadway production of Gas Light, which he helped bring to New York.
Price started out in films as a character actor. He made his film debut in Service de Luxe (1938), and established himself in the film Laura (1944), opposite Gene Tierney, directed by Otto Preminger. He played Joseph Smith in the movie Brigham Young (1940) and William Gibbs McAdoo in Wilson (1944), as well as Bernadette's prosecutor, Vital Dutour, in The Song of Bernadette (1943), and as a pretentious priest in The Keys of the Kingdom (1944). Price's first venture into the horror genre, for which he later became widely known, was in the Boris Karloff film Tower of London (1939). The following year, Price portrayed the title character in The Invisible Man Returns (a role he reprised in a voice-only cameo in the closing scene of the horror-comedy spoof Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein released in 1948). He reunited with Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven (1945) and Dragonwyck (1946). He also had many villainous roles in film noir thrillers such as The Web (1947), The Long Night (1947), Rogues' Regiment (1948), and The Bribe (1949), with Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner, and Charles Laughton. Price's first starring role was as con man James Reavis in the biographical film The Baron of Arizona (1950). He did a comedic turn as the tycoon Burnbridge Waters, co-starring with Ronald Colman in Champagne for Caesar (also 1950), one of his favorite film roles.
Price was active in radio, portraying the Robin Hood-inspired crime-fighter Simon Templar in The Saint, which ran from 1947 to 1951. In the 1950s, Price moved into more regular horror-film roles with the leading role in House of Wax (1953) as a homicidal sculptor, the first three-dimensional film to land in the year's top 10 at the North American box-office. His next roles were The Mad Magician (1954), the monster movie The Fly (1958), and its sequel Return of the Fly (1959). That same year, Price starred in two thrillers by producer-director William Castle: House on Haunted Hill as eccentric millionaire Fredrick Loren, and The Tingler as Dr. Warren Chapin, who discovered the titular creature. He appeared in the radio drama Three Skeleton Key, the story of an island lighthouse besieged by an army of rats. He had first performed the work in 1950 on Escape and returned to it in 1956 and 1958 for Suspense. Outside the horror realm, Price played Baka in The Ten Commandments, released in 1956. About this time, he also appeared in episodes of television shows such as Science Fiction Theatre, Playhouse 90, and General Electric Theater. In the 1955–56 television season, he was cast three times on the religion anthology series Crossroads. In the 1955 episode "Cleanup", Price portrayed the Reverend Robert Russell. In 1956, he was cast as Rabbi Gershom Mendes Seixas in "The Rebel", and as the Rev. Alfred W. Price in "God's Healing".
In the 1960s, Price achieved a number of low-budget filmmaking successes with Roger Corman and American International Pictures (AIP) starting with the House of Usher (1960), which earned over $2 million at the box office in the United States and led to the subsequent Edgar Allan Poe adaptations of The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), The Comedy of Terrors (1963), The Raven (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964). He starred in The Last Man on Earth (1964), the first adaptation of the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend, and later starred as Felix Manderville in House of 1,000 Dolls (1967), which has been described as "quite possibly the sleaziest movie AIP ever made". A year later, Price portrayed witch hunter Matthew Hopkins in Witchfinder General, (US: The Conqueror Worm, 1968) set during the English Civil War. Price also starred in comedy films such as Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965) and its sequel Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (1966). In 1968, he played the part of an eccentric artist in the musical Darling of the Day, opposite Patricia Routledge. In the 1960s, Price began his role as a guest on the television game show Hollywood Squares, becoming a semi-regular in the 1970s, including being one of the guest panelists on the finale in 1980. Price made many guest-star appearances in television shows during the decade, including The Red Skelton Show, Daniel Boone, F Troop, Get Smart, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. He had a recurring role in the Batman TV series as the villain Egghead from 1966 to 1967. In 1964, he provided the narration for the Tombstone Historama in Tombstone, Arizona, which was still in operation as of 2016. He also starred as the host of the Australian TV series If These Walls Could Speak, in which a short history of an historical building (supposedly narrated by the building itself) was covered, and as the narrating voice of the building.
