"When I was nine I played the demon king in Cinderella and it launched me on a long and happy life of being a monster."
-Boris Karloff

Boris Karloff was the biggest monster star of the sound era, a fitting successor to the great Lon Chaney. He was so big that in 1932, just a year after he shot to stardom in the legendary Frankenstein, he was billed in The Mummy by his last name only - "Karloff the Uncanny" - a distinction previously only achieved by Greta Garbo. It was well earned. Like Chaney before him, Karloff made the monsters and madmen he played painfully human. As Universal Studios head Carl Laemmle, Jr. said in explaining his casting as the Frankenstein monster, "His eyes mirrored the suffering we needed."

Karloff was born in England in 1887 and groomed for a life in the civil service, a fate he escaped by running off to Canada at the age of 22. There he worked as a farm hand until he succumbed to the lure of the footlights, touring Canada and the U.S. in a series of stage productions.

He made his film debut as an extra in ballerina Anna Pavlova's The Dumb Girl of Portici in 1916. He played minor roles in over 40 silent films without making much of an impact. Talking films brought him more substantial work, and when Howard Hawks cast him as a murderous convict in The Criminal Code (1931), Karloff's performance caught the eye of director James Whale, who had just taken over Frankenstein.

His role in that horror classic made Karloff a household name. Through the 1930s he starred as almost every type of monster in the horror film canon, including the fiendish Chinese warlord in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1933) and a killer brought back to life in The Walking Dead (1936). Unlike other horror stars, he brought a shattering humanity to his genre performances, which may account for his continued casting in meaty character roles in non-horror films like John Ford's The Lost Patrol (1934) and Cecil B. DeMille's Unconquered (1947).

By the early 1940s, however, as the horror cycle declined, Karloff frequently had to turn to poverty row quickies to find roles like the mad scientist who dons an animal's skin to commit murders as The Ape (1940) or a doctor who experiences with a psychopath's blood in Before I Hang (1940). As a respite from such roles, he returned to the stage, scoring personal hits as the murderous brother who looks like Boris Karloff in Arsenic and Old Lace (1941) and as Captain Hook in the 1950 revival of Peter Pan co-starring Jean Arthur. His screen career was rescued, albeit briefly, when Val Lewton, producer of RKO's acclaimed line of psychological horror films, cast him as the murderous grave robber in The Body Snatcher (1945) and a Greek general who fears a vampire infestation in Isle of the Dead (1945).

Karloff's status as the dean of horror stars kept him working until his death in 1969. Before then, he enjoyed another renaissance, this time thanks to producer-director Roger Corman, who teamed him with fellow fright stars Vincent Price and Peter Lorre (not to mention a very young Jack Nicholson) in The Raven (1963). Corman would also produce the film that many feel contains Karloff's best performance, Targets (1968). In that early outing for director Peter Bogdanovich, Karloff plays an aging horror star who faces down a sniper at the premiere of his final film.

by Frank Miller