Boris Karloff

Boris Karloff (1887-1969), British actor, permanently identified with the creature created by Frankenstein and the golden age of Hollywood horror. Born William Henry Pratt in London and educated at the city university with a view to following his father into the diplomatic corps, Karloff instead chose a career farming in Canada, which he soon swopped for acting.

For years Karloff toured with travelling companies and while in Los Angeles played a bit-part in His Majesty the American (1919). He worked steadily and unspectacularly throughout the rest of the silent period, escaping attention until he played the trusty convict who turns killer in The Criminal Code (1931).

Frankenstein (1931) was a film intended for Bela Lugosi as a follow-up to Dracula, but the latter's feuding with Universal led to them casting Karloff instead. Karloff was pathetic rather than frightening as the monster, but displayed all his considerable skills in the role that, along with others, proved him a master of this genre. The Mummy,The Old Dark House, and The Mask of Fu Manchu (all 1932) are all examples. As the vogue for horror waned, he played supporting parts and leads in B-movies. He received top billing in an A-picture only once again, in The Climax (1944), which Universal hoped would repeat the success of Claude Rains in the 1943 version of The Phantom of the Opera. Karloff's later films were often unexceptional and low-budget, whether American, British, or Spanish, with the exception of Bogdanovich's Targets (1968), in which Karloff plays a horror film star, a thinly disguised portrait of himself.