08/21/2021 13:00
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Updated 08/21/2021 1:00 PM
It was written.
If someone had to get into the role of Dracula, how much better if he credited common origins with those of the Count who in 1897 the Irish writer
Bram Stoker
gave him a life as eternal as the one that gave him the success of the novel, which multiplied in new editions, movies, plays, musicals, comics and everything you can imagine.
Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó met that condition.
But it was not the only virtue that the man born on October 20, 1882 - or perhaps 1884, according to the source - could wield in Lugoj, about five hours by car from the Borgo Gorge where the vampire's castle was located, in Please get the role that would make him famous, and that would also shred much of his future.
The actor
seemed to be tailor-made for the character.
To such an extent that it would cost him horrors to detach himself from it and what at some point was a source of consecration would end up being a kind of condemnation that he himself was in charge of exacerbating in the extreme.
Bela Lugosi in a classic scene from the film that made him famous and was his conviction at the same time.
Miner, railwayman, soldier and actor
But the truth is that Blaskó's story was far from being born with Dracula.
In fact, before entering the world of acting through some Shakespearean works and after being orphaned with a father at just 12 years old, he walked some 500 kilometers from Budapest - his father was Hungarian - to return to Romania
to practice. as a miner and railway apprentice
.
A harsh present for an early adolescent seeking his own direction, though possibly not as harsh as the one Béla faced as an infantry lieutenant during World War I, during which he
was wounded at least twice.
As a result, his back was severely damaged, and so was his psyche.
That was
the beginning of his drug addiction
.
The union activist
Between the two chapters, Lugosi took his first steps in acting, a field in which he managed to stand out quickly, thanks to his 1.85 height and his intense blue eyes, which
projected him into the role of gallant
, which he himself promoted from his fondness for women, which would lead him to consummate five marriages with an unhappy ending.
Almost simultaneously with the loss that left him out of the battlefield, the man began to travel his acting career.
And with it, under the protection of the Hungarian revolution in 1918, which led to the creation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic,
a trade union career as an active leftist militant
and founder of the actors union.
Lugosi starred in union complaints and political movements that led him to have to flee his country.
Except that Béla, who led strikes and supported the creation of the communist republic, did not count on the fact that four months later the counterrevolutionary right would regain the government and restore the monarchy.
Immediately, the repression initiated by the conservative government of Regent Miklós Horthy targeted the activists, and
the actor was then left with no choice but, shortly after, to flee the country
.
First to Austria, then to Germany, where he worked on
The Head of Janus
with Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau - who, paradoxically, would later film
Nosferatu
- and, finally, in the United States.
By the time the merchant ship he was traveling on docked in New Orleans,
Béla had already participated in 25 films
, several of them directed by the Hungarian Michael Curtiz, future director of
Casablanca
(1942) and many of Errol Flynn's films, and in Hollywood, and had an experience that prompted him to move immediately to New York, where he formed a theater company.
A characteristic scene from the film Dracula, released in 1931.
Dracula, from theater to screen
In this plan, little by little, he made his way onto the New York theater scene until, in 1927,
he got the great opportunity to star
in a Broadway
adaptation of
Dracula
and Béla was not willing to contradict what had been written.
Nor did he when he was asked to take his portrayal of the Transylvanian Count to the cinema, under the direction of Tod Browning.
It had not been the first option, but
an affair with a famous actress, Clara Bow
, worked in favor in the compulsa.
Marketing issues, which already in 1930 had their weight.
In addition, the chosen one, Lon Chaney, was unlucky enough to die before filming began.
It is true that Béla was not called to be the first Dracula on the big screen.
Earlier, in 1922, the same Murnau who had directed it during his time in Germany, brought Stoker's novel to the set, although without the approval of the author's wife, who had died in 1912. Justice ruled in favor of the widow, and
the order was to destroy all copies of the silent film
.
Fortunately some of them survived, and with the names of the characters changed and with
Nosferatu
for the title,
the film became one of the jewels of German Expressionism
.
But
that of Béla Lugosi, released 90 years ago, was
Dracula
, and it became the success that shot its protagonist to fame
.
Although not wealth, since for almost seven weeks of filming he earned only $ 3,500, half that of the supporting actor.
But that didn't matter then, if it was about portraying someone in fiction who might as well have been his neighbor in reality.
The character as a jail
And the reality is that just as the power of his performance pigeonholed him in the horror genre forever, his identification with the role reached irrational extremes, in a plane in which there
seemed to be no limit between reality and fiction
.
From then on, despite some attempts, Lugosi would never remove the vampire stigma again.
Bela Lugosi became so identified with the character that she could not escape him.
The look that seemed to shoot some kind of terrifying spell, the inseparable cloak, the kind voice that was terrifying at the same time, the aura of mystery enveloping each of his movements, as if something tremendous was going to happen at any moment, filled the eyes with expectation. eyes of the onlookers who surrendered to his power.
In the same way that
Lugosi surrendered to the dictates of an industry that had decided that it would have no work except to scare
.
White Zombie
,
The kiss of death
,
The island of lost souls
,
The shadow that kills
,
The black cat
,
The mark of the vampire
...
Perhaps the story would have been somewhat different, if he had accepted when he was summoned to play Frankenstein in
The Son of Frankenstein
, released in 1939, and thus prevented
Boris Karloff
from becoming a competition for being number one in of the genre.
But Béla preferred not to disappoint her followers, and ended up being Ygor.
Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, with whom he was said to have had a very tense and competitive relationship.
Especially considering that a few years later, he would have no choice but to play the creature invented by Mary Shelley, in the degrading
Frankenstein and the Werewolf
.
The decline of the actor's career was underway
, and he had no qualms about accelerating it, while it was rumored that at home, instead of sleeping in a bed, he did so in a coffin, and that he preferred blood to wine.
"Why did I specialize in horror performances? Blame it on Dracula. When I first appeared in a New York theater upon my arrival from Hungary, I played a charming role. The next one was Dracula ... "
, Lugosi told the Spanish newspaper
La Vanguardia
, in 1933!
And he added, with an unconcealed resignation: "And since then
I have been Dracula forever
! In Hollywood they have already cataloged me as such, and I never hope to play the roles that I sincerely desire."
Overtime and nothing to salvage
During World War II, he reactivated his political drive
to propagandize against Nazism
and to pressure the United States to accept more Jewish refugees from Hungary.
Something that will surely have had to do with the subsequent appearance of his name during the investigations of the Committee on Un-American Activities,
accused of being a communist
.
But by then, Béla had already submitted his talent, and his prestige, playing the Count for the last time in
Abbott and Costello against the ghosts
(1948), where
he parodied himself
and from where there was no turning back.
With his finances at minus 10, any job offer was welcome, as he continued to climb the slope.
Alcohol, Ed Wood and the home stretch
Even so, and despite the fact that his fourth divorce definitively pushed him into alcoholism, at the same time that his pain deepened his dependence on morphine, Béla had a few more episodes to play within the sets.
And
he did it at the hands of Ed Wood
, a confessed fan of his, who first signed him for his film
Glen or Glenda
and then for
The Monster's Bride
.
Ed Wood's The Monster's Girlfriend was one of Bela Lugosi's last works
Many years later, the great
Tim Burton would manage to recreate it through Michael Landau
in his film
Ed Wood
, starring masterfully by the great Johnny Depp.
With Hollywood's back to him, in the midst of a progressive process of self-destruction, Béla became
one of the first stars to publicly confess his addiction
and to enter a detoxification center, at the expense of the financial support that Frank Sinatra gave him anonymously. , great admirer of the actor.
They say that Lugosi
had no qualms about showing the press his arms and legs full of punctures
, and that he met his fifth wife while he was in the process of recovery.
Martin Landau played Bela Lugosi in the film Ed Wood, for which he won an Oscar.
Photo REUTER
Death found him while he slept, in the small apartment he rented in Los Angeles, on August 16, 1956, at the age of 73, allegedly
cured of his addictions but irremediably given over to alcohol
.
Rumors indicate that before his body was removed, his family was in charge of making the bottles that undermined his bed and surroundings disappear.
Shortly before, he had been filming
Plan 9 from Outer Space
, once again under the direction of Ed Wood, who once he died replaced him with someone who looked nothing like him.
The result could not be worse: the film, released in 1957, is
popularly considered the worst film in the history of cinema
.
They say that Béla Lugosi was buried in his vampire costume, at the request of his children.
And, also, that it's supposed to be still there.
IT IS
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