Vincent Leonard Price

 Vincent Leonard Price, Jr. (May 27, 1911 – October 25, 1993)

Despite his lasting association with the world of horror, Price started out as a character actor. He made his film debut in 1938 with Service de Luxe and established himself in the film Laura (1944), opposite Gene Tierney, directed by Otto Preminger. He also played Joseph Smith in the movie Brigham Young (1940) and William Gibbs McAdoo in Wilson (1944) as well as a pretentious priest in The Keys of the Kingdom (1944). Price's first venture into the horror genre was in the 1939 Boris Karloff film Tower of London. The following year he portrayed the title character in the film The Invisible Man Returns (a role he reprised in a vocal cameo at the end of the 1948 horror-comedy spoof Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein). In 1946, Price reunited with Tierney in two notable films, Dragonwyck and Leave Her to Heaven. There were also many villainous roles in film noir thrillers like The Web (1947), The Long Night (1947), Rogues' Regiment (1948) and The Bribe (1949), with Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner and Charles Laughton. In the 1950s, Price moved into horror films, with a role in House of Wax (1953), the first 3-D film to land in the year's top ten at the North American box office. His next roles were The Mad Magician (1954), the monster movie The Fly (1958) and its sequel Return of the Fly (1959). Price starred in the original House on Haunted Hill (1959) as the eccentric millionaire Fredrick Loren. He later starred in House of Usher (1960), which earned over $2 million at the box office in the United States and led to the subsequent Edgar Allan Poe adaptations of The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), The Comedy of Terrors (1963), The Raven (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), and The Tomb of Ligeia (1965).

Known for his iconic voice, Price has narrated several animation films, radio dramas and documentaries as well as the monologue on Michael Jackson song Thriller. For his voice work in Great American Speeches (1959), he was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album. Price was also on television, playing the villain Egghead on the Batman series. Besides Batman, Price made guest star appearances in many shows of the decade, including Get Smart, F Troop, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. His last significant film work was as the inventor in Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands (1990). Vincent Price suffered from emphysema, a result of being a lifelong smoker, and Parkinson's disease. He died in 1993 from lung cancer, at age 82, and was cremated.