Bela Lugosi

Bela Lugosi's, née Béla Ferenc Dezsõ Blaskó, was born in Lugos, Austria-Hungry, now Lugoj, Romania. The youngest of four children, he volunteered and was commissioned as an infantry lieutenant in World War I, where he was wounded three times. Bela Lugosi married Ilona Szmik in 1917 and divorced in 1920, the first of 5 marriages. In December of 1921, Bela relocated to New York. He became a US citizen in 1931 and married Lullian Arch in 1933. Lullian was the mother of his only child, Bela Lugosi Jr., born in 1938. Bela and Lullian divorced in 1951. During the mid-thirties, Bela Lugosi helped organized the Screen Actors Guild, and joined as member number 23.

In 1927, Bela Lugosi stepped into the role that would both immortalize him and wreck his career, the titular character in a Broadway adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. The play's three-year run shot Bela into the limelight. The untimely death of Lon Chaney led to Tod Browning choosing Bela to once again don the cape for the film version of Dracula in 1931. Although he'd been stateside for almost a decade, he was still not fluent in English and had to learn his part phonetically. Apparently his thick accent was not a problem with women, as Bela purportedly received more fan mail than Clark Gable.

While he was a distinguished stage actor in Hungry, appearing in Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Taming of the Shrew and Richard III, Bela Lugosi ended up a destitute drug-addict in Hollywood. On August 16, 1956, Bela died of a heart attack. In a funeral quietly paid for by Frank Sinatra, he was buried in his full Dracula costume, cape included. According to Vincent Price, when he and Peter Lorre went to view Bela Lugosi's body during the funeral, Lorre made a comment about Bela's attire. "Do you think we should drive a stake through his heart just in case?" Some find it odd that Martin Landau won an Oscar for his role of impersonating Bela in the Tim Burton film Ed Wood, seeing as Bela himself never even came close to winning one.

Some personal quotes...
"I guess I'm pretty much of a lone wolf. I don't say I don't like people at all but, to tell you the truth I only like it then if I have a chance to look deep onto their hearts and their minds."
"I am Count Dracula"