Actors - Vincent Price

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	Actors - Vincent Price

Vincent Leonard Price, Jr. (May 27, 1911 – October 25, 1993), born in St. Louis, Missouri to Vincent Leonard Price and Marguerite Willcox Price, was an American film actor. He is most well remembered for his roles in a series of low-budget horror films where his distinctive voice and serio-comic attitude were well used. In such films, his tall physique and polished urbane manner made him something of an American counterpart to the older Boris Karloff.

His father was president of the National Candy Company. Price Jr. was educated at Yale in art history and fine art. He was a member of Alpha Sigma Phi Fraternity and the Courtauld Institute, London . He became interested in theater in the 1930s, appearing professionally on stage from 1935.

He made his film debut in 1938 with Service de Luxe and established himself as a competent player, notably in Laura
(1944), directed by Otto Preminger. He acted as Joseph Smith, Jr. in the movie Brigham Young (1940).

In the 1950s he moved into horror films, enjoying the role in the successful curiosity House of Wax (1953), the first 3-D film to land in the year's top ten at the North American box office, and then the classic monster movie The Fly (1958). The six-four actor also starred in the original House on Haunted Hill
(1959) as eccentric millionaire Fredrick Loren. (The actor playing the same character in the 1999 remake was made to not only resemble, but was renamed after Price.)

In the 1960s, he had a number of low-budget successes with Roger Corman and AIP including the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum
(1961), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven
(1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Tomb of Ligeia
(1965). These were followed by numerous other roles throughout the 1960s where he played characters in horror films that were often closely modelled on the Corman Poe films. He has also appeared in The Abominable Dr. Phibes
(1971) and Theatre of Blood
(1973), where he created a series of campy tongue-in-cheek villains. Price also recorded dramatic readings of Poe's short stories and poems, which were collected together with readings by Basil Rathbone.

He often spoke of his joy at playing "Egghead" on the popular Batman television series. Another of his co-stars, Yvonne Craig (Batgirl), often said Price was her favorite co-star. Vincent, after a take was printed, started throwing eggs at Adam West and Burt Ward and when asked to stop replied "With a full artillery? Not a chance!", causing an eggfight on the soundstage.

He greatly reduced his film work from around 1975, as horror itself suffered a slump, and increased his narrative and voice work. For example, Price's voiceover is heard on Alice Cooper's first solo album Welcome to My Nightmare; in Michael Jackson's music video, Thriller
as well on Iron Maiden's "The Number of the Beast"'; and, in one of his last major and one of his favourite feature film roles, as the voice of Professor Ratigan in Walt Disney Pictures' The Great Mouse Detective
. He also starred for a year in the early '70's in a syndicated daily radio program, Tales of the Unexplained which was produced by voice actor Mel Blanc's company, Mel Blanc Audiomedia.

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Actors - Vincent Price

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