People active in the silent era and people who keep the silent era alive. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

Photograph: Silent Era image collection.

Bela Lugosi

Born 20 October 1882 in Lugos, Austria-Hungary (now Lugoj, Romania) as Béla Ferenc Dezsö Blaskó.
Died 16 August 1956 in Los Angeles, California, USA, of a heart attack.

Married Ilona Szmik, 25 June 1917; divorced, July 1920.
Married Ilona von Montagh, 7 September 1921; divorced, February 1924.
Married Beatrice Woodruff Weeks, 27 July 1929; divorced, 9 December 1929.
Married Lillian Arch, 31 January 1933; son, Bela George Lugosi (Bela Lugosi Jr.), born 5 January 1938; divorced, 17 July 1953.
Married Hope Louise Lininger, 25 August 1955; until his death, 16 August 1956.

Bela Lugosi began acting on stage in Hungary in 1901, where he achieved notable fame. His motion picture acting career began in Hungary in 1917. Lugosi moved to Germany in 1919 where he began appearing in motion pictures, including Lederstrumpf [The Deerslayer and Chingachgook] (1920) based on the novel The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper and Der Januskopf (1920) based on the novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson and directed by F.W. Murnau. He soon after emigrated to the United States in 1920 to persue a more promising cinema acting career.

In Hollywood during the silent era, Lugosi worked for a number of production companies as an independent actor including Fox Film Corporation (1923 and 1929), Distinctive Pictures Corporation (1924), Chadwick Pictures Corporation (1925), Walter Morosco Productions (1929) and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Corporation (1929).

His greatest motion picture success came as the lead in Dracula (1931) for Universal Pictures Corporation. It is well-known that the role led to a number of typecast appearances in horror and mystery films for B-studios with their diminishing budgets over the following two decades. However, a number of the films he made in the 1930s and 1940s are beloved by generations of cinema fans, including White Zombie (1932), Chandu the Magician (1932), Island of Lost Souls (1932), The Black Cat (1934), Mark of the Vampire (1935), The Invisible Ray (1936), The Wolf Man (1941), The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) and The Body Snatcher (1945).

References: Website-IMDb.