Book Review: Boris Karloff – More Than A Monster
Not just a pretty face
Review: ‘Boris Karloff – More Than A Monster’ the authorised biography by Stephen Jacobs
As Frankenstein’s Monster, Boris Karloff has become a cultural icon encapsulating the ‘golden era’ of movie horror, writes Mark Cantrell. Beneath the make-up and the macabre roles, however, was a thoroughly nice chap who earned the affection and respect of his peers, as this detailed but sometimes heavy-going biography reveals
First published on Cheshire Today
FOR horror aficionados, Boris Karloff needs no introductions; he is the face of movie horror’s ‘golden age’, although admittedly that face is usually smothered in the prosthetics that transformed him into the Monster that made his name.
Frankenstein (1931) propelled the then jobbing film actor onto the world stage of international stardom, but by the time this ‘big break’ landed him on his lead-weighted feet, he already had a solid 20-year career as an actor behind him. Ironically, the role of the Monster was never expected to be anything more than a ‘throwaway’ part, but Karloff’s acting shone through to create an iconic screen presence. A star was born; the product of a long apprenticeship one might say.
Karloff’s career
spanned almost 50 years and over 150 movies, ranging from the silent
picture era through to the days of the ‘Swinging Sixties’. His
roles in ‘Bride of Frankenstein’, ‘The
Mummy’, ‘The Black Cat’, and
many others – most now considered classics of the genre – ensured
his reputation as ‘The King of Horror’.
There was more – much
more – to Karloff than this iconic role, however, as Stephen
Jacobs’ biography makes clear in compelling detail.
The biography is a
solid tome; a heavy read and not just in terms of the book’s
physical weight, but the sheer wealth of information it assembles.
The book is without doubt a labour of love and can be very
heavy-going given the amount of material packed into its 568 pages,
but it offers a fascinating and almost encyclopaedic insight into
Karloff the man as much as Karloff the master of the macabre.
Having not read any
rival biographies of Boris Karloff, it’s impossible to say how
Jacobs’ labours compare against its competitors, but his work
scooped a Rondo Award for best book earlier this year, so it is
hardly a slacker in its exploration of the man. It has also been
endorsed by Karloff’s daughter Sara, making it an authorised
account of her father’s life and work. By all accounts, it’s
proved an eye-opener for her: “[I]t is such a learning experience
for me. I never knew about my father’s family, about his early
life, how old he was when his mother died, and on and on and on.”
The biographer’s
craft is not an easy one; sourcing the material, be it letters or
press cuttings, from decades gone, chasing down friends and
acquaintances, interviews, assembling the wealth of material from
such a variety of sources, is certainly no easy task. Jacobs’
research was made all the harder by his subject’s itinerant
lifestyle as a jobbing thespian with a number of touring companies.
He was also rather fond
of his privacy, and tended to play up the mystique of his Karloff
stage name, regaling people with its Russian origins and playing down
his own Anglo-Indian heritage. In part, there’s the actor no doubt
creating the brand, but as Jacobs’ work takes us back in time to
less racially-enlightened times, if it can be put that way, there was
also an element of diverting attention away from his own mixed-race
ancestry.
Karloff was born
William Henry Pratt in Camberwell, South London, in 1887. He was born
of a relatively well-to-do family, of Anglo-Indian descent, and was
expected to follow in his family’s footsteps as a civil servant in
the administrative machinery running the Empire. However, young Billy
– as he was known – fell in love with the stage. He turned his
back on the comfortable, if predictable, life of government service –
and headed off for the uncertainty and poverty that was the touring
actor’s lot.
In 1911, he ran off to
Canada, where he joined a succession of touring theatre companies,
living out of a suitcase and learning the nifty trick of frying an
egg for breakfast on an iron. When stage work was not forthcoming, he
took any labouring work he could find.
Hard though the life
was, he persevered. He scored worthy reviews for his performances,
developed the professional and easy-going attitude that would win him
much respect as a movie star, and never forgot his roots as a jobbing
actor worrying where his next paycheck might come from. Eventually,
he tried his hand in Hollywood, stepping back and forth between film
and stage, until that breakthrough role with Frankenstein came his
way.
Over the course of his
life, Karloff got through five wives; he didn’t become a father
until the age of 51 when his daughter Sara arrived. By then he was a
Hollywood staple and also, it must be said, an active trade unionist.
The founding member of the Screen Actors’ Guild was a tireless
recruiter for the union, and often recruited on the sets of his
movies.
The actor kept working
almost literally until the very end, and some of his last
performances didn’t appear until after his death in 1968. His later
years were plagued with ill-health. Indeed, in one of his final
screen appearances, ‘The Curse of the Crimson Altar’ (1968), the
actor was in a wheelchair – not for the sake of the role, but
because his health demanded it. In pain, Karloff persevered with
little complaint.
Endurance in the face
of discomfort, even pain, was a common theme in Karloff’s career
and his ability to grit his teeth and press on without complaint,
whilst delivering a strong performance, helped earn him the respect
of his peers. Some of his later ills were a legacy of the injuries
and strains sustained in his earlier film roles; the make-up and
prosthetics for the Monster were a heavy burden that placed a real
physical strain on the actor. And that wasn’t just in the wearing
of it, but in the long hours it took to apply and remove the make-up.
Karloff worked some gruelling hours to give us the iconic image of
Frankenstein’s unholy creation.
For modern audiences,
that classic image now seems a little kitsch, we’ve see it that
often, and moviemakers have since given us a gallery and more of
schlock-horror to curl our toes and chill our bones. Back in the day,
however, Karloff’s get-up was terrifying to behold. By all
accounts, when he was made up as the Monster, he was expected to wear
a bag over his head when leaving the set to avoid scaring people and
he had to go around accompanied. That’s before he was banned from
leaving the set altogether. Perhaps that serves to show just how
desensitised we have become in this age of high-tech and CGI visual
wizardry.
As for the man himself,
Karloff was by all accounts more enamoured of the macabre than the
gory visuals we’ve grown used to; his preference was for the
subtlety of performance, for the chilling potential of suspense, to
convey horror. He personally was anything but a monster, as the
biography ably demonstrates, just an actor following the breaks where
they would.
“I didn’t set out
to chill anyone. I was just an actor willing to try anything. I had
no special interest in terror subjects. My private tastes are still
very Catholic,” he said. That quote occurs at the very beginning of
the book, and captures in essence, the biography of the man. As
Jacobs’ strives to reveal, he was a thoroughly nice bloke who got
lucky playing horrific roles, but there was more to his screen and
stage personae, and whether playing monsters, old-fashioned but very
much human villains, or the good guys, he left them on set when he
was done.
As for Jacobs and his
performance with this biography, he has certainly produced an
in-depth and detailed portrait of the man’s professional and
personal life. At times, it might be heavy going, but he has
certainly done his subject justice.
Details:
Boris Karloff – More
Than A Monster
The Authorised
Biography
By Stephen Jacobs
Hardback, 568 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9557670-4-3
Price: £30
Tomahawk Press
This article was first published on Cheshire Today, 11 September 2012.
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