Boris Karloff

British actor Boris Karloff (1887–1969) created a cinematic icon when he played the role of the monster in the 1931 film Frankenstein.

The ghoulish makeup he wore and the lurching walk he adopted in the film have become conventions, even cliches, of horror films. And beyond the individual techniques Karloff used when playing the role of the monster, he created a feeling of sympathy for the character, a technique that has since become a more general trait of successful horror films, whose monsters often gain intensity by fascinating audiences as well as repelling them. Karloff became a star with Frankenstein, which he made when he was already well into middle age. His life up to that point had been colorful, and attracted a host of biographers in spite of his reticence about his personal affairs. After Frankenstein, Karloff made many other films, some of them quite significant. He enjoyed a successful run as a stage actor and became a familiar figure on radio and then television. It was Frankenstein, however, that put his name in lights and led to his being billed, at the height of his fame, simply as "Karloff." That name recognition was something only a few other movie stars have achieved.

Groomed for Government Career

The youngest of nine children, Karloff was born William Henry Pratt on November 23, 1887, in Camberwell, a suburb of London, England. His father, Edward Pratt, had worked for much of his life in India, as a salt tax administrator for the British colonial government. The elder Pratt married three times; his third wife, Eliza, was Karloff's mother. Her family had lived in India as well, and some have speculated, as a way of explaining Karloff's unusually dark complexion, that she may have been partly of Indian ancestry. Edward Pratt left the family when Karloff was a year old, and he was raised largely by his stepsister Emma. Several of his older brothers entered the British civil service, and some of them followed their father's example and took posts in India. It was assumed that young Karloff would do the same.

Karloff's interests at school ran more to sports and music than to studying, however. His stage debut came in 1896 in a school play, a version of Cinderella. He loved to play and watch cricket, an enthusiasm he held for his entire life. Moving on from Enfield Grammar School to Merchant Taylor's School and the Uppingham School in London, Karloff kept on top of his studies and won admission to King's College at the University of London in 1907.

There he took courses that would lead to a place in Britain's diplomatic corps, but he spent more time attending plays in London. He dreamed of a theatrical career himself, but his family ridiculed the idea. In 1909 Karloff found himself frustrated with university studies. He was receiving poor grades and was supremely restless. Deciding to leave Britain, he flipped a coin to decide whether he would go to Canada or Australia. Canada won, and after coming ashore in Montreal in May of 1909, Karloff soon found himself rounding up horses in a field at 4:30 in the morning, having been hired as a farmhand. Karloff soon made his way to western Canada, moving from Banff, Alberta, to Vancouver, British Columbia, paying his way with such jobs as racetrack digger, streetcar track builder, and coal shoveler.

A place on a survey crew with the British Columbia Electric Company brought both a salary raise and an improvement in working conditions for Karloff, but he still nurtured hopes of becoming an actor. Hearing of a job with a troupe called the Jean Russell Players, he took a train to Kamloops, British Columbia, to audition. He devised the stage name Boris Karloff, claiming that Karloff was a name from his mother's family background, and he was quoted as saying in Scott Allen Nollen's book Boris Karloff that he pulled the name Boris "from out of the cold, Canadian air." Karloff claimed to have had experience on stage in England, and was hired. The troupe's managers quickly saw through the ruse and cut his salary in half, but Karloff barnstormed around Canada with the troupe for two years, until a Saskatchewan tornado brought the Jean Russell Players to an abrupt end.

Entered United States

Karloff signed on with another troupe, the St. Clair Players. This job was hardly more lucrative; Karloff recalled having to cook his breakfast by frying an egg on an electric iron propped upside down between a Gideon Bible and a bedpost. But the St. Clair Players did operate on both sides of the border; Karloff entered the United States for the first time via North Dakota in October of 1913, and traveled through the upper Midwest. He left and rejoined the St. Clair group as he found work with other theatrical stock companies, and eked out a living while traveling around the country. When World War I broke out, Karloff volunteered to join the British army but was rejected because of a heart murmur. The St. Clair Players sputtered to a halt for good in 1917, but by that time they had reached Los Angeles, California, landing Karloff at the doorstep of the growing film industry.

Touring with several theater companies in southern California, Karloff began appearing as an extra in films. His first film credit may have been for His Majesty, the American, starring Douglas Fairbanks, in 1919; he appeared in several dozen films during the silent era, and his memory of the very earliest ones was hazy. By the early 1920s he was finding consistent film work, often playing Native Americans, Mexicans, or Asian characters as a result of his exotic looks—at the time, Hollywood films were virtually an all-white preserve. Even after several years of working in the lower levels of the industry, Karloff saw few prospects of a breakthrough, and took a job in 1923 unloading giant putty casks from a building materials truck. He had married musician Montana Laurena Williams in 1920, after a first marriage, to actress Olive de Wilton, ended in divorce sometime after 1912. Karloff married dancer Helene Vivian Soulee in 1924, Los Angeles librarian Dorothy Stine in 1930, and English-born Evelyn Hope Helmore in 1946.

After meeting with silent film horror star Lon Chaney Sr. in the late 1920s, Karloff received some much-needed encouragement. Chaney (as quoted by Nollen) told him that "the secret of success in Hollywood lies in being different from anyone else. Find something no one else can or will do—and they'll begin to take notice of you. Hollywood is full of competent actors. What the screen needs is individuality!" Karloff took the advice to heart, stepping into negative roles that took advantage of his gaunt, rather unnerving appearance. His career took a step up with a role in Scarface under director Howard Hawks in 1931, and later that year he was sitting in a Universal Studios lunchroom when English-born director James Whale, in the process of casting Frankenstein, noticed him and envisioned him in the role of the monster.

Karloff got the part after Bela Lugosi turned it down to pursue another project, and he became a major star almost overnight. The film was a tremendous box office success, touched off a vogue for horror films that lasted through much of the 1930s, and was soon hailed as a classic. Three-quarters of a century later the film still held up well, largely thanks to the strongly human qualities of Karloff's performance. "There are more moments of quiet power (most of them involving the strikingly effective Boris Karloff as the monster who simply wants to be loved) than you'll find in a fistful of big-budget horror films," noted Dan Jardine in the All Movie Guide. Karloff wore several pounds of makeup and donned heavy asphalt shoes that gave the monster his characteristic gait.

Made Over $3,000 a Week

Karloff signed a contract with Universal Studios that gave him a salary of $750 a week in 1932. After several more hits, including The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) and The Black Cat (1934, with Lugosi), his weekly salary had risen to $3,750. He earned his keep, making nine films during 1932 alone. His films varied in quality, but his elegant variations on the persona he had established with Frankenstein made them consistently compelling. Karloff and his wife Dorothy moved out of what they described as a shack in Laurel Canyon into a series of increasingly elegant lodgings, culminating in a mansion in the Coldwater Canyon area, where Karloff could indulge his passion for gardening. He also amassed a collection of unusual pets that included a tortoise, a parrot, egg-laying chickens, a cow named Elsie, a four-hundred-pound pig, and several dogs, two of which were named Angus Dei and Silly Bitch. Even as he personally experienced tremendous success, Karloff emerged as an advocate for the welfare of actors who labored in the trenches, as he had for so long. In 1933 he became a co-founder of the Screen Actors Guild union.

Often bemused by the Frankenstein phenomenon, Karloff also had a certain affection for the monster and was reluctant to make sequels that would degrade the impact of the original film. He made one, Bride of Frankenstein, in 1935, and another, Son of Frankenstein, in 1938, in the year his only child, a daughter Sara, was born. In 1940 he returned to the stage, starring in the original Broadway production of the comic horror play Arsenic and Old Lace, and going on tour with the company as it toured 66 cities during World War II. During the war years Karloff also edited two best-selling collections of horror and suspense stories, Tales of Terror and And the Darkness Falls.

Karloff made numerous films after the war, but he became increasingly known for his work on radio and television. He hosted the radio program Starring Boris Karloff beginning in 1949, and the show successfully made the transition to television in the early 1950s. Two 1950 projects, the radio show Boris Karloff's Treasure Chest and the Broadway show Peter Pan, demonstrated Karloff's appeal to children and opened up a successful career avenue for him in his later years. Karloff and his wife Evelyn moved to New York in 1951, eventually taking up residence in the Dakota apartment building.

Continuing to find joy and energy in performing, as he had since his youth, Karloff remained busy as an actor until his last days. Broadening his repertoire well beyond horror, he appeared on Broadway in The Lark in 1955 and was nominated for an Antoinette Perry (Tony) Award. Beginning the following year and continuing until 1968, Karloff recorded a daily radio program, Tales from the Reader's Digest. In 1962 he earned a Grammy nomination in the children's recordings category for his LP Rudyard Kipling's Other Just So Stories: The Cat Who Walked by Himself, and in 1966 Karloff narrated an animated television special, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. A broadcast of the program became an annual tradition, and Karloff became almost as familiar to baby-boomers for that role as he was for Frankenstein.

Karloff never took American citizenship. He lived with his wife in London during his last years, returning to the United States to work on projects in concentrated bursts. Among the most interesting products of his later years was the 1967 film Targets, directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starring Karloff as an aging horror film star who wants to retire because he finds the real world more horrifying than anything in the movies. Karloff continued to work on new films despite poor health; his last film was Chamber of Fear (1968), made in Mexico. He died in a hospital in Midhurst, Sussex, England, on February 2, 1969.

Books

Buehrer, Beverly Bare, Boris Karloff: A Bio-Bibliography, Green-wood, 1993.

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Vol. 3: Actors and Actresses, 4th ed., St James, 2000.

Jensen, Paul M., Boris Karloff and His Films, Barnes, 1974.

Nollen, Scott Allen, Boris Karloff, McFarland, 1991.

Underwood, Peter, Karloff: The Life of Boris Karloff, Drake, 1972.

Periodicals

New York Times, February 3, 2006.

Online

"Frankenstein," All Movie Guide, http://www.allmovie.com (February 19, 2006).