Vincent Price

Price had three marriages: first marriage to actress Edith Barrett with whom he had a son named Vincent, second marriage to Mary Grant with whom he had a daughter Victoria and third to Australian actress Coral Browne.

Price suffered from emphysema as he was a heavy smoker and also had Parkinson’s disease as he grew older. On October 25, 1993, he died of lung cancer at UCLA Medical Center and was cremated in Malibu, California.

Vincent Price was born on May 27, 1911 in St. Louis, Missouri, to Vincent Leonard Price, Sr. and Marguerite Cobb Wilcox. His father was the president of the National Candy Company. His grandfather was the innovator of the cream of tartar baking powder.

Price belonged to an affluent family and attended the St. Louis Country Day School. He later went to the Yale University to study art history and remained active in the publication of their humor magazine, ‘Yale Record’.

For a few years after graduating, Price took up teaching and then attended the University of London for a Masters Degree in Fine Arts but he felt more and more inclined towards theatre.

Price did theatre for the first time in 1934 and from there onwards his acting career began in London with his performance in Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre. In the following years, he appeared in ‘Victoria Regina’.

Year 1938 marked the beginning of Price’s Hollywood career; he started out as a character actor with the movie, ‘Service de Luxe’. But it was ‘Laura’ that made him a known face in the industry.

He ventured into the horror movies genre and did Boris Karloff’s ‘Tower of London’ in 1939. In the following year, he appeared in the lead role in a horror science fiction film, ‘The Invisible Man Returns’.

In 1944, Price did many character based movies like ‘Wilson’—an American biographical movie about President Woodrow Wilson, and ‘The Keys of the Kingdom’ based on a novel with the same title.

In the following years, Price endeavored into stronger roles and some of them were even villainous—‘Dragonwyck (1946)’, ‘Leave Her to Heaven (1946)’, ‘The Web (1947)’, ‘The Long Night (1947)’, ‘The Bribe (1949)’, etc.

Price’s is well-known for his voice-over and narration work, but what he is most remembered for is his horror genre roles, especially Roger Corman’s adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s works.