William Henry Pratt, better known by his stage name Boris Karloff, was an English actor who starred as Frankenstein's monster in the horror film Frankenstein, which established him as a horror icon.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,274 |
William Henry Pratt, better known by his stage name Boris Karloff, was an English actor who starred as Frankenstein's monster in the horror film Frankenstein, which established him as a horror icon.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,274 |
Boris Karloff reprised the role in Bride of Frankenstein and Son of Frankenstein .
FactSnippet No. 1,155,275 |
Boris Karloff's brother, Sir John Thomas Pratt, was a British diplomat.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,277 |
Edward John Pratt was Anglo-Indian, with a British father and Indian mother, while Boris Karloff's mother had some Indian ancestry, thus Boris Karloff had a relatively dark complexion that differed from his peers at the time.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,278 |
Boris Karloff learned how to manage his stutter, but not his lisp, which was noticeable throughout his career in the film industry.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,279 |
Boris Karloff was the youngest of nine children, and following his mother's death was brought up by his elder siblings.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,280 |
Boris Karloff did not reunite with his family until he returned to Britain to make The Ghoul, extremely worried that his siblings would disapprove of his new, macabre claim to world fame.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,281 |
Boris Karloff joined the Jeanne Russell Company in 1911 and performed in towns like Kamloops and Prince Albert .
FactSnippet No. 1,155,282 |
Boris Karloff later took a job as a railway baggage handler and joined the Harry St Clair Company that performed in Minot, North Dakota, for a year in an opera house above a hardware store.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,283 |
From this grueling work with the BCER and other employers, Boris Karloff was left with back problems for the rest of his life.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,284 |
Boris Karloff was able to find work with the Haggerty Repertory for a while .
FactSnippet No. 1,155,285 |
Once Boris Karloff arrived in Hollywood, he appeared in dozens of silent films, but the work was sporadic, and he often had to take up manual labour such as digging ditches or delivering construction plaster to make ends meet.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,286 |
Boris Karloff was in another serial, The Masked Rider, the earliest of his film appearances that survived.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,287 |
Boris Karloff played an Indian in The Last of the Mohicans with Wallace Beery and he would often be cast as an Arab or Indian in his early films.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,288 |
Boris Karloff did a Western, The Hellion, and a drama, Dynamite Dan .
FactSnippet No. 1,155,289 |
Boris Karloff could be seen in Parisian Nights, Forbidden Cargo, The Prairie Wife and the serial Perils of the Wild .
FactSnippet No. 1,155,290 |
Boris Karloff went back to bit part status in Never the Twain Shall Meet, directed by Maurice Tourneur, but he had a good support part in Lady Robinhood starring Evelyn Brent in the titular role.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,291 |
Boris Karloff went on to be in The Greater Glory, Her Honor, the Governor, The Bells, The Nickel-Hopper with Mabel Normand, The Golden Web, The Eagle of the Sea, Flames, Old Ironsides with Wallace Beery and Esther Ralston, Flaming Fury, Valencia, The Man in the Saddle with Hoot Gibson, Tarzan and the Golden Lion, Let It Rain, The Meddlin' Stranger, The Princess from Hoboken, The Phantom Buster with Buddy Roosevelt, and Soft Cushions .
FactSnippet No. 1,155,292 |
Boris Karloff had roles in Two Arabian Knights, The Love Mart with Noah Beery Sr.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,293 |
Boris Karloff was in The Devil's Chaplain, The Fatal Warning for Richard Thorpe, The Phantom of the North, Two Sisters, Anne Against the World, Behind That Curtain with Warner Baxter, and The King of the Kongo, a serial directed by Thorpe.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,294 |
Boris Karloff had an uncredited bit part in The Unholy Night directed by Lionel Barrymore, and bigger parts in The Bad One, The Sea Bat starring Charles Bickford and directed by Lionel Barrymore and Wesley Ruggles, and The Utah Kid directed by Thorpe.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,295 |
Boris Karloff did another serial for Thorpe, King of the Wild, then had support parts in Cracked Nuts with Wheeler and Woolsey, Young Donovan's Kid with Jackie Cooper, Smart Money with Edward G Robinson and James Cagney in their only film together, The Public Defender with Richard Dix, I Like Your Nerve with Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,296 |
Boris Karloff could be seen in The Yellow Ticket with Elissa Landi, Lionel Barrymore and Laurence Olivier during Olivier's memorable first round in Hollywood, The Mad Genius with John Barrymore, The Guilty Generation with Robert Young and Tonight or Never with Gloria Swanson.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,297 |
Boris Karloff acted in eighty movies before being found by James Whale and cast in Frankenstein .
FactSnippet No. 1,155,298 |
Boris Karloff was third billed in the Twentieth Century Pictures historical film The House of Rothschild with George Arliss, which was highly popular.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,301 |
Boris Karloff reprised the role of Frankenstein's monster in Bride of Frankenstein for James Whale.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,302 |
Columbia, Boris Karloff made The Black Room then he returned to Universal for The Invisible Ray with Lugosi, more a science fiction film.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,303 |
Boris Karloff went to Monogram to play the title role of a Chinese detective in Mr Wong, Detective, which led to a series.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,304 |
Boris Karloff's portrayal of the character is an example of Hollywood's use of yellowface and its portrayal of East Asians in the earlier half of the 20th century.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,305 |
Boris Karloff reprised his role, with Lugosi starring as Ygor and top-billed Basil Rathbone as Frankenstein.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,306 |
Boris Karloff returned to Universal to make Tower of London with Rathbone, playing the murderous henchman of King Richard III.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,307 |
Boris Karloff made a fourth Mr Wong film at Monogram The Fatal Hour .
FactSnippet No. 1,155,308 |
Boris Karloff finished a six picture commitment with Monogram with The Ape .
FactSnippet No. 1,155,309 |
Boris Karloff starred in a radio adaptation produced by Screen Guild Theatre in 1946.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,310 |
Boris Karloff returned to film roles in The Climax, an unsuccessful attempt to repeat the success of Phantom of the Opera .
FactSnippet No. 1,155,311 |
Boris Karloff made three films for producer Val Lewton at RKO: The Body Snatcher, his last teaming with Lugosi, Isle of the Dead and Bedlam .
FactSnippet No. 1,155,312 |
Boris Karloff left Universal because he thought the Frankenstein franchise had run its course; the entries in the series after Son of Frankenstein were B-pictures.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,313 |
Danny Kaye comedy, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Boris Karloff appeared in a brief but starring role as Dr Hugo Hollingshead, a psychiatrist.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,314 |
Boris Karloff appeared in a film noir, Lured, and as an Indian in Unconquered .
FactSnippet No. 1,155,315 |
Boris Karloff appeared as the villainous Captain Hook in Peter Pan in a 1950 stage musical adaptation which featured Jean Arthur.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,316 |
Boris Karloff returned to horror films with The Strange Door and The Black Castle .
FactSnippet No. 1,155,317 |
Boris Karloff was nominated for a Tony Award for his work opposite Julie Harris in The Lark, by the French playwright Jean Anouilh, about Joan of Arc, which he reprised years later on TV's Hallmark Hall of Fame.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,318 |
Later, as a guest on NBC's The Gisele MacKenzie Show, Boris Karloff sang "Those Were the Good Old Days" from Damn Yankees while Gisele MacKenzie performed the solo, "Give Me the Simple Life".
FactSnippet No. 1,155,320 |
Boris Karloff served as host and one of the stars of the anthology series The Veil, a 12-episode Hal Roach TV series which was never broadcast at all due to financial problems at the producing studio; the complete series was later rediscovered in the 1990s and eventually released on DVD.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,321 |
Boris Karloff made some horror films in the late 1950s: Voodoo Island, The Haunted Strangler, Frankenstein 1970, and Corridors of Blood .
FactSnippet No. 1,155,322 |
Boris Karloff donned the Frankenstein Monster make-up for the last time in 1962 for a Halloween episode of the TV series Route 66, which featured Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney, Jr.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,323 |
Boris Karloff went to Italy to appear in Black Sabbath directed by Mario Bava.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,324 |
Boris Karloff made The Raven for Roger Corman and American International Pictures .
FactSnippet No. 1,155,325 |
British actress Suzan Farmer, who played his daughter in the film, later recalled Boris Karloff was aloof during production "and wasn't the charming personality people perceived him to be", probably because he was in such intense pain in the 1960s.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,326 |
Boris Karloff later received a Grammy Award for "Best Recording For Children" after the recording was commercially released.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,327 |
Boris Karloff starred in Targets, the first feature film directed by Peter Bogdanovich, featuring two separate plotlines that converge into one.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,328 |
Boris Karloff starred as the retired horror film actor, Byron Orlok, a thinly disguised version of himself; Orlok was facing an end of life crisis, which he resolves through a confrontation with the crazed gunman at the drive-in cinema.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,329 |
Boris Karloff ended his career by appearing in four low-budget Mexican horror films: Isle of the Snake People, The Incredible Invasion, Fear Chamber and House of Evil.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,330 |
Boris Karloff was originally slated to travel to Mexico to shoot the films, but he had emphysema and crippling arthritis.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,331 |
Boris Karloff recorded the title role of Shakespeare's Cymbeline for the Shakespeare Recording Society .
FactSnippet No. 1,155,332 |
Boris Karloff was credited for editing several horror anthologies, commencing with Tales of Terror .
FactSnippet No. 1,155,334 |
Boris Karloff was a charter member of the Screen Actors Guild, and he was especially outspoken due to the long hours he spent in makeup while playing Frankenstein's Monster and the Mummy.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,335 |
Boris Karloff married six times and had one child, daughter Sara Karloff, by fifth wife Dorothy Stine.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,337 |
Boris Karloff contracted bronchitis in 1968 and was hospitalised at University College Hospital.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,338 |
Boris Karloff died of pneumonia at the King Edward VII Hospital, Midhurst, in Sussex, on 2 February 1969, at the age of 81.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,339 |
An illustrated likeness of Boris Karloff continued to introduce each issue of this publication for more than a decade after his death ; the comic lasted until the early 1980s .
FactSnippet No. 1,155,341 |
Boris Karloff acted in 21 episodes of the Inner Sanctum ABC anthology radio series from 1941 to 1952:.
FactSnippet No. 1,155,342 |