Vincent Price
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Vincent Leonard Price Jr. (May 27, 1911 – October 25, 1993) was an American film actor.
Vincent Price is best remembered for his distinctive voice and serio-comic attitude in a series of distinctive horror films. His tall 6' 4" (1.93 m) stature and polished urbane manner made him something of an American counterpart to the older Boris Karloff.[1] [May 2007] In the 1960s, he had a number of low-budget successes with Roger Corman and American International Pictures (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 in which he played characters in horror films who were often closely modeled on the Corman Poe films. He has also appeared in The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) and Theatre of Blood (1973), in which 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.
In 1968 he played the part of an eccentric artist in the musical Darling of the Day opposite Patricia Routledge, displaying an adequate if untrained singing voice.
He often spoke of his pleasure 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.
In an often-repeated anecdote from the set of Batman, Price, after a take was printed, started throwing eggs at series stars Adam West and Burt Ward, and when asked to stop replied, "With a full artillery? Not a chance!", causing an eggfight to erupt on the soundstage. This incident is reenacted in the behind-the-scenes telefilm Return to the Batcave: The Misadventures of Adam and Burt.
