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| 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. |
