Tuesday, May 29, 1934

Mother went to the doctor today.

Vincent Leonard Price, Jr. (May 27, 1911 – October 25, 1993)

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Price was an American actor, well known for his distinctive
voice and serio-comic performances in a series of horror films made in the latter part of his career.
He attended St. Louis Country Day School and was further educated at Yale in art history
and fine art. He was a member of the Courtauld Institute, London. He became interested in the
theatre during the 1930s, appearing professionally on stage for the first time in 1935.

He made his film debut in 1938 with Service de Luxe and established himself in the film Laura
1944), opposite Gene Tierney and directed by Otto Preminger. He also played Joseph Smith,
 Jr. in the movie Brigham Young (1940) and William Gibbs McAdoo in Wilson (1944) as well as a
pretentious priest in The Keys of the Kingdom (1944).

Price's first venture into the horror genre was in the 1939 Boris Karloff film Tower of London.
The following year he portrayed the title character in the film The Invisible Man Returns
(a role he reprised in a vocal cameo at the end of the 1948 horror-comedy spoof Abbott and Costello 
Meet Frankenstein). Numerous other horror films, too many to mention here, followed.

A patron of the arts, Price donated some 90 pieces from his own collection to East Los Angeles
College in Monterey Park, California, thus establishing the first "teaching art collection" owned
by a community college in the U.S. The collection contains over 9,000 pieces and has been
valued in excess of $5 million.

Price, a lifelong smoker, died of lung cancer at UCLA Medical Center. He was cremated and
his ashes were scattered off Point Dume in Malibu, California.