Vincent Price, 1911-1993

I'm surprised to see that I never did a birthday post for Vincent Price, who was born May 27, 1911. I've blogged about quite a few of Price's movies, of course. Price is best-known for all that horror that he did in the second half of his career, but I find the movies he did in the first half much more interesting. I think my favorite Price performance might be in His Kind of Woman, in which Price plays a washed-up ham actor in Mexico who gets the chance to save Robet Mitchum by putting those ham acting skills to good use. Price had a lot of supporting roles (and even His Kind of Woman isn't a starring role), especially when he was a contract player at Fox, so I'm not certain which movie that has him in the cast is the best of them all. Probably Laura, even if I'm more partial to Leave Her To Heaven.

I'm surprised to see that I haven't blogged about Dragonwyck before; it's one of Price's starring roles (opposite Gene Tierney) in which Price plays a wealthy landowner in 19th Century New York who brings poor-girl Tierney to his estate first to be governess to his child, and then his wife; she comes to believe something wrong is going on in the house. This being a holiday, I'll simply link to a post from a blog called Classic Movies Digest about the movie, with several screenshots.

As for thoughts on Price himself, writer Edward Copeland says things far better than I could, and with a lot of pictures. (In fact, looking through my blog posts, I don't know if I've ever used any photos with Vincent Price in them. I was googling for one of him as Walter Raleigh in Elizabeth and Essex, but there don't seem to be many of those on the web.)