Boris Karloff (far right) and his brothers, London 1933.
It must be next to impossible these days to build yourself up from scratch, successfully effacing all things you did that wish you could forget about. Did you marry the wrong guy and don't want anyone to know? Want a more appealing surname? Seems like most of our favourite personalities from the golden age of Hollywood transformed themselves into whatever they wished; recordkeeping was perhaps less reliable (especially in frontier territories) and of course google didn't exist to put everything you ever did or said in stone for all to see, forever. Boris Karloff is a great example. Born the very English William Henry Pratt, he spent several years in British Columbia performing in theatre troupes and doing odd jobs. He's remembered fondly in Regina for pitching in when a tornado blew through town in 1912, leaving the streets strewn with planks and debris. (The tornado also bankrupted the troupe he had been associated with, the Jean Russell Company).
Author Cynthia Lindsay was a friend of Karloff's (godmother to his daughter) and this book has a chummy if undisciplined tone. She calls herself a detective as she attempts to sniff out facts like how many times he really was married (we never find out). While not prudish, she's polite, yet her insertion of herself into this biography has little value. When interviewing Karloff's ex-wife Dorothy (and an old friend), she describes herself as somewhat uncomfortable in the role of biographer: "we both immediately got the giggles," she writes, "and it wasn't easy forcing myself into the role of 'Brenda Starr, reporter.'" The book is more of a scrapbook than true a biography, scattered with amusing anecdotes and family photos. But for all her detective work, Lindsay digs up very little on Karloff's pre-Hollywood years.
Lindsay does discuss the ghettoization of actors by ethnic background in early Hollywood. Though Karloff left England to escape its class-based rigidity, he seems to have projected a thoroughly English persona while in the actors' colony: he played cricket, posed for a portrait with a cup of tea, and used distinctively English words and phrases. Karloff cites Bela Lugosi's inability to launch a mainstream career as stemming from his difficulties assimilating completely into American culture. "He spent a great deal of time with the Hungarian colony in Los Angeles, and this isolated him," Karloff is quoted as having said to an interviewer. Karloff cleverly adopted an exotic mystique (and surname) but was never saddled with it, as was a truly foreign actor. Like fellow Englishman Cary Grant, Karloff went out of his way to obfuscate his past; yet still I would have preferred something richer than this picture book.
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