Trivia: At the peak of his career in the early '30s, actor Bela Lugosi was the screen's most notorious personification of evil; the most famous and enduring Dracula, he helped usher in an era of new popularity for the horror genre, only to see his own fame quickly evaporate. Béla Ferenc Dezsõ Blaskó was born in Lugos, Hungary, on October 20, 1882. After seeing a touring repertory company as they passed through town, he became fascinated by acting, and began spending all of his time mounting his own dramatic productions with the aid of other children. Upon the death of his father in 1894, Lugosi apprenticed as a miner, later working on the railroad. His first professional theatrical job was as a chorus boy in an operetta, followed by a stint at the Budapest Academy of Theatrical Arts. By 1901, he was a leading actor with Hungary's Royal National Theatre, and around 1917 began appearing in films (sometimes under the name Arisztid Olt) beginning with A Régiséggyüjtö. Lugosi was also intensely active in politics, and he organized an actors' union following the 1918 collapse of the Hungarian monarchy; however, when the leftist forces were defeated a year later he fled to Germany, where he resumed his prolific film career with 1920's Der Wildtöter und Chingachgook. Lugosi remained in Germany through 1921, when he emigrated to the United States. He made his American film debut in 1923's The Silent Command, but struggled to find further work, cast primarily in exotic bit roles on stage and screen. His grasp of English was virtually non-existent, and he learned his lines phonetically, resulting in an accented, resonant baritone which made his readings among the most distinctive and imitated in performing history. In 1924, Lugosi signed on to direct a drama titled The Right to Dream, but unable to communicate with his cast and crew he was quickly fired; he sued the producers, but was found by the court to be unable to helm a theatrical production and was ordered to pay fines totalling close to 70 dollars. When he refused, the contents of his apartment were auctioned off to pay his court costs -- an inauspicious beginning to his life in America, indeed. Lugosi's future remained grim, but in 1927 he was miraculously cast to play the title character in the Broadway adaptation of the Bram Stoker vampire tale Dracula; reviews were poor, but the production was a hit, and he spent three years in the role. In 1929, Lugosi married a wealthy San Francisco widow named Beatrice Weeks, a union which lasted all of three days; their divorce, which named Clara Bow as the other woman, was a media sensation, and it launched him to national notoriety. After a series of subsequent films, however, Lugosi again faded from view until 1931, when he was tapped to reprise his Dracula portrayal on the big screen. He was Universal executives' last choice for the role -- they wanted Lon Chaney Sr., but he was suffering from cancer -- while director Tod Browning insisted upon casting an unknown. When no other suitable choice arose, however, only Lugosi met with mutual, if grudging, agreement. Much to the shock of all involved, Dracula was a massive hit. Despite considerable studio re-editing, it was moody and atmospheric, and remains among the most influential films in American cinema. Dracula also rocketed Lugosi to international fame, and he was immediately offered the role of the monster in James Whale's Frankenstein; he refused -- in order to attach himself to a picture titled Quasimodo -- and the part instead went to Boris Karloff. The project never went beyond the planning stages, however, and in a sense Lugosi's career never righted itself; he remained a prolific screen presence, but the enduring fame which appeared within his reach was lost forever. Moreover, he was eternally typecast: Throughout the remainder of the decade and well into the 1940s, he appeared in a prolific string of horror films, some good (1932's Island of Lost Souls and 1934's The Black Cat, the latter the first of many collaborations with Karloff), but most of them quite forgettable. Lugosi's choice of projects was indiscriminate at best, and his reputation went into rapid decline; most of his performances were variations on his Dracula role, and before long he slipped into outright parodies of the character in pictures like 1948's Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, which was to be his last film for four years.As Lugosi's career withered, he became increasingly eccentric, often appearing in public clad in his Dracula costume. He was also the victim of numerous financial problems, and became addicted to drugs. In 1952, he returned from exile to star in Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, followed later that year by the similarly low-brow My Son, the Vampire and Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire. By 1953, Lugosi was firmly aligned with the notorious filmmaker Ed Wood, widely recognized as the worst director in movie history; together they made a pair of films -- Glen or Glenda? and Bride of the Monster -- before Lugosi committed himself in 1955 in order to overcome his drug battles. Upon his release, he and Wood began work on the infamous Plan 9 From Outer Space, but after filming only a handful of scenes, Lugosi died of a heart attack on August 15, 1956; he was buried in his Dracula cape. In the decades to come, his stature as a cult figure grew, and in 1994 the noted filmmaker Tim Burton directed the screen biography Ed Wood, casting veteran actor Martin Landau as Lugosi; Landau was brilliant in the role, and won the Oscar which Lugosi himself never came remotely close to earning -- a final irony in a career littered with bittersweet moments.

Trivia: With her pale almost translucent eyes and seemingly permanent air of exhaustion, blonde Helen Chandler was perfectly cast as Dracula's near-tragic Mina Seward, and if translated into a parable on addiction, which the Gothic horror classic often is, the role also eerily mirrored the actress' real life.A graduate of New York's Professional Children's School (where one of her classmates was the equally star-crossed Lillian Roth of I'll Cry Tomorrow fame), Chandler made her Broadway bow in Barbara (1917) and three years later played the doomed Prince Richard to John Barrymore's homicidal Richard III. She was Ophelia opposite Basil Sydney in the famous 1925 modern-dress version of Hamlet and was fast becoming one of Broadway's most talked about young ingenues when Hollywood came knocking on the door. Having made an inauspicious debut in the New York-lensed The Music Master (1927), Helen Chandler found herself perfectly cast in the ethereal Outward Bound (1930), as the suicide victim who finds herself on a cruise ship to destiny. Mina Seward in Dracula was just another contract assignment for the actress, who rather saw herself playing the title role in Alice in Wonderland (a role that, three years later, instead went to the much less talented Charlotte Henry). Few realized it at the time, but Chandler had already begun her lifelong battle with alcoholism, a tragic predilection only facilitated by her new husband, the hard-drinking British playwright Cyril Hume.Due to its latter-day cult status, Dracula remains Chandler's most revered film assignment, but she was also effective as the mail-order bride opposite Walter Huston in A House Divided (1931) and as Colin Clive's daughter in Christopher Strong (1933). At the time, however, most of the attention was lavished on her Broadway returns: Helen Bennett in Pride and Prejudice (1935), the heroine in Bella Spewack's Hollywood satire Boy Meets Girl (1936-1937), and especially a repeat performance as the ghostly traveler in the 1938 revival of Outward Bound. Divorced from Hume, she married her co-star in these and several other stage productions, British actor Bramwell Fletcher.By 1940, however, Chandler's drug and alcohol dependency had briefly landed her in a sanitarium, and continued ill health forced her to retire completely from performing after a stint opposite Joe E. Brown in a Los Angeles production of The Show Off (1941). In his unpublished autobiography, Bramwell Fletcher blamed Chandler's alcoholism for their 1940 divorce (ironically, he would later marry the equally dependent Diana Barrymore), after which her life seems to have spiraled out of control. In November of 1950, Chandler was badly burned in a Hollywood apartment fire -- newspaper accounts vividly described how her once so beautiful face had been mercilessly scarred -- and her death from cardiac arrest in April of 1965 was reported by almost no one. Sadly, Helen Chandler's ashes remain unclaimed at a Venice, CA, cemetery.If nothing else, Helen Chandler will forever be remembered for playing Dracula's most prominent victim. Even though the more recent discovery of the Spanish-language version of the classic thriller features a much more vibrant Lupita Tovar in a production perhaps more to the taste of modern-day sensibilities, for most genre fans, Chandler remains the quintessential virgin despoiled.

Trivia: A descendant of William the Conqueror (or so his studio publicity claimed), Canadian actor David Manners was brought to films by director James Whale, who cast the personable, aristocratic-looking young man in the 1930 filmization of Journey's End. It was Manners' thankless task to be the handsome but ineffectual hero of many a horror film: he was forever being knocked out, locked out, or otherwise detained from promptly rescuing the heroine in such films as Dracula (1931), The Mummy (1932) and The Black Cat (1934). He was better served as one of the Hemingwayesque heroes in The Last Flight (1931) and the unfortunate title character in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1935). Manners quit film acting in 1936 to pursue a satisfying career as stage performer and novelist. Living in wealthy retirement in his 80s, David Manners was frequently an interview subject for books about his famous Hollywood associates (John Barrymore, Tod Browning, Boris Karloff et. al.); his recollections were always crystal clear, always amusing, and always unadorned (to Mr. Manners, Dracula star Bela Lugosi was nothing more or less than "a pain in the ass").

Trivia: Born in Kansas and raised in Colorado, Dwight Frye studied for a career in music, and by his mid-teens was a talented concert pianist. He switched to acting when he joined the O.D. Woodward stock company in 1918. During his years on Broadway, Frye specialized in comedy parts. When Hollywood called, however, the actor found himself typed as a neurotic villain. The role that both made and broke him was the bug-eating lunatic Renfield in 1931's Dracula. Though he begged producers to allow him to play comic or "straight" parts, he was hopelessly typed as Renfield, and spent the bulk of his career portraying murderers, grave robbers, crazed hunchbacks and mad scientists. When the first "horror" cycle subsided, Frye found himself accepting nondescript bit roles in films like The People vs. Dr. Kildare (1939). During the 1940s, Frye bounced from one "B" factory to another, doing his usual in such cheap thrillers as Dead Men Walk (1942). In between acting jobs, he supported himself and his family as a designer in an aircraft factory. Dwight Frye was about to undertake the stereotype-breaking role of Secretary of War Newton D. Baker in the lavish 20th Century-Fox biopic Wilson when he died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 44.

Trivia: His Teutonic cadence has led many to assume that Edward Van Sloan was German-born, but in fact he hailed from San Francisco. After a lengthy career as a commercial artist, Van Sloan turned to the stage in the World War I years. He came to Hollywood in 1930 to repeat his stage role as dour vampire hunter Professor Van Helsing in Dracula (1930), a role he'd reprised in 1936's Dracula's Daughter. Surprisingly, this most famous of Van Sloan's screen characterizations was his least favorite: he considered himself hopelessly hammy as Van Helsing (even though he seems a model of restraint opposite the florid Bela Lugosi). Van Sloan went on to essay Van Helsing-type characters in Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), and Before I Hang (1940). He also was given a few opportunities to play the evil side of the fence as the "surprise killer" in such quickies as Behind the Mask (1932) and Death Kiss (1933). For the most part, Van Sloan's film career was limited to bit roles; he was especially busy during World War II, playing everything from resistance leaders to Nazi diplomats. Edward Van Sloan retired in 1947, emerging publicly only to grant an interview or two during his remaining 15 years on earth.

Trivia: A cool-looking blonde, Frances Dade became known as Dracula's most memorable victim and an image of Bela Lugosi lustfully hovering over her prostrate body remains an indelible part of popular culture. A 1931 Wampas Baby Star, Dade arrived in Los Angeles in 1930 as Lorelei Lee in a touring company of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Apart from the role of Dracula's ill-fated Lucy Weston, however, Hollywood had little to offer and she returned to the legitimate stage. Retiring after a short-lived Broadway play, Collision (1932), to marry socialite Brock Van Avery, Dade returned to her hometown of Philadelphia and may later have become a nurse.

Trivia: Burly Russian actor Michael Visaroff launched his film career in 1925. Like many of his fellow Russian expatriates, Visaroff claimed to be of noble lineage, which enabled him to land such roles as Count Bosrinov in Disraeli (1929). From the early '30s until his death, he was usually cast as innkeepers, most memorably in Universal's first two Dracula films and in Laurel and Hardy's The Flying Deuces (1939). Michael Visaroff's funniest film appearance was as the homicidal maniac ("She's the first wife I ever killed!") who shares a jail cell with W.C. Fields in Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935).

Trivia: Never a Hollywood glamour girl, brunette Brooklynite Dorothy Tree was a versatile general purpose actress, playing everything from a middle-class housewife to a Nazi spy. After graduating from Cornell and working extensively on Broadway, Tree came to Hollywood for a part in the Fox musical comedy Just Imagine (1930). She remained in films for the next twenty years, appearing in such roles as Elizabeth Edwards in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) and Teresa Wright's mother in The Men (1950) (Marlon Brando's first film). Given her expertise at dialects and subtleties of intonations, it isn't surprising that Dorothy Tree later became a top vocal coach, writing a public-speaking guide titled A Woman's Voice.

Trivia: In films from 1915 to 1948, British stage veteran Wyndham Standing's heyday was in the silent era. During this time, Standing appeared in stiff-collar, stuffed-shirt roles in films like The Dark Angel and The Unchastened Woman (both 1925). His early-talkie credits include the squadron leader in Hell's Angels (1931) and Captain Pyke in A Study in Scarlet (1933). Thereafter, Standing showed up in such one-scene bits as King Oscar in Madame Curie (1943); he was also one of several silent-screen veterans appearing as U.S. senators in Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Wyndham Standing was the brother of actors Sir Guy Standing and Herbert Standing.

Trivia: The scion of a wealthy Argentine family, boyishly handsome Barry Norton came to Hollywood in 1926, where he was promptly signed to a Fox Studios contract. Stardom came fairly rapidly for Norton with his poignant performance as "mama's boy" Private Lewisohn in the 1927 WWI drama What Price Glory? He followed this triumph with excellent performances in such films as Legion of the Condemned and Four Devils (1928). He had difficulty weathering the change to talking pictures, not because his voice was inadequate, but because he'd never truly mastered the English language. In the early talkie era, Norton starred in Spanish-language versions of Hollywood films (he played the David Manners part in the Spanish Dracula), occasionally doubling as director. His last important screen role was the South American fiancé of ingénue Jean Parker in Frank Capra's Lady for a Night (1933). In 1935, he was given a comeback opportunity as the romantic lead in Laurel and Hardy's Bonnie Scotland (1935), but he was replaced during rehearsals, reportedly because he couldn't keep apace of Stan and Ollie's improvisations. Norton spent the remainder of his Hollywood career as a bit player and extra, taking whatever job came his way without complaint or regret. An excellent dancer, he frequently showed up in nightclub and ballroom scenes, occasionally giving between-takes dance lessons to such male stars as Humphrey Bogart. One of Barry Norton's last screen appearances was as a priest in the 1952 remake of What Price Glory?