Bela Lugosi

Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó (October 20, 1882 – August 16, 1956), known professionally as Bela Lugosi, was a Hungarian–American actor, best remembered for portraying Count Dracula in the 1931 horror classic Dracula, Ygor in Son of Frankenstein (1939) and his roles in many other horror films from 1931 through 1956.

Lugosi, the youngest of four children, was born Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó in 1882 in Lugos, Kingdom of Hungary (now Lugoj, Romania) to Hungarian father István Blaskó, a baker who later became a banker, and Serbian-born mother Paula de Vojnich.

He was raised in a Catholic family.

At the age of 12, Lugosi dropped out of school and left home to work at a succession of manual labor jobs.

His father died during his absence.

Lugosi began acting on the Hungarian stage in 1902.

He began his stage acting career in 1902.

His earliest known performances are from provincial theatres in the 1903–04 season, playing small roles in several plays and operettas.

He took the last name "Lugosi" in 1903 to honor his birthplace, and went on to perform in Shakespeare plays.

After moving to Budapest in 1911, he played dozens of roles with the National Theatre of Hungary between 1913 and 1919.

Although Lugosi would later claim that he "became the leading actor of Hungary's Royal National Theatre", many of his roles there were small or supporting parts, which led him to enter the Hungarian film industry.

During World War I, he served as an infantryman in the Austro-Hungarian Army from 1914 to 1916, rising to the rank of lieutenant.

He was awarded the Wound Medal for wounds he sustained while serving on the Russian front.

Returning to civilian life, Lugosi became an actor in Hungarian silent films, appearing in many of them under the stage name "Arisztid Olt".

After playing in 172 productions in his native Hungary, Lugosi moved on to appear in Hungarian silent films in 1917.

Lugosi's first film appearance was in the 1917 Hungarian silent film Leoni Leo.

When appearing in Hungarian silent films, he mostly used the stage name Arisztid Olt.

Lugosi made at least 10 films in Hungary between 1917 and 1918 before leaving for Germany.

He had to suddenly emigrate to Germany after the failed Hungarian Communist Revolution of 1919 because of his former socialist activities (organizing a stage actors' union), leaving his first wife in the process.

He acted in several films in Weimar Germany, before arriving in New Orleans as a seaman on a merchant ship, then making his way north to New York City and Ellis Island.

Due to his activism in the actors' union in Hungary during the revolution of 1919 and his active participation in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, he was forced to flee his homeland when the government changed hands, initially accompanied by his first wife Ilona Szmik.

They escaped to Vienna before settling in Berlin (in the Langestrasse), where he began acting in German silent films.

During these moves, Ilona lost her unborn child, after which she left Lugosi and returned home to her parents where she filed for divorce, and soon after remarried.

Following the collapse of Béla Kun's Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, leftists and trade unionists became vulnerable, some being imprisoned or executed in public.

Lugosi eventually travelled to New Orleans, Louisiana in December, 1920 working as a crewman aboard a merchant ship, then made his way north to New York City, where he again took up acting in (and sometimes directing) stage plays in 1921–1922, then worked in the New York silent film industry from 1923 to 1926.

In 1921, he met and married his second wife, Ilona von Montagh, a young Hungarian emigree and stage actress whom he had worked with years before in Europe.

They only lived together for a few weeks, but their divorce took until October 1925 to be finalized.

In 1927, he starred as Count Dracula in a Broadway adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel, moving with the play to the West Coast in 1928 and settling down in Hollywood.

He later moved to California in 1928 to tour in the Dracula stage play, and his Hollywood film career took off.

Lugosi claimed he performed the Dracula play around 1,000 times during his lifetime.

Through the 1930s, he occupied an important niche in horror films, but his notoriety as Dracula and thick Hungarian accent greatly limited the roles offered to him, and he unsuccessfully tried for years to avoid typecasting.

He co-starred in a number of films with Boris Karloff, who was able to demand top billing.

To his frustration, Lugosi, a charter member of the American Screen Actors Guild, was increasingly restricted to mad scientist roles because of his inability to speak English more clearly.

He was kept employed by the studios principally so that they could put his name on the posters.

He later starred in the 1931 film version of Dracula directed by Tod Browning and produced by Universal Pictures.

He eventually became a U.S. citizen in 1931, soon after the release of his film version of Dracula.

Among his teamings with Karloff, he performed major roles only in The Black Cat (1934), The Raven (1935), and Son of Frankenstein (1939); even in The Raven, Karloff received top billing despite Lugosi performing the lead role.

By this time, Lugosi had been receiving regular medication for sciatic neuritis, and he became addicted to doctor-prescribed morphine and methadone.

This drug dependence (and his gradually worsening alcoholism) was becoming apparent to producers, and after 1948's Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, the offers dwindled to parts in low-budget films; some of these were directed by Ed Wood, including a brief (posthumous) appearance in Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957).

Lugosi married five times and had one son, Bela G. Lugosi (with his fourth wife, Lillian).