Three faces of horror:
Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Vincent Price
Photo by Terry O'Neill (1983)
Today is the birthday of both Vincent Price (1911-1993) and Christopher Lee (1922-2015), two legends of the cinema; as is Peter Cushing (1913-1994), who, coincidentally, was born on the 26th of May.
Interestingly, the three men were not just professional colleagues, but very close friends on and off set, as this rather touching short video in which Lee talks about Cushing and Price with obvious affection demonstrates: click here.
As their acting styles and the roles they played were very distinct, it's hard to say which of them I admired most, but - like the Carry On actors - each left an indelible impression on my imagination as a child who grew up watching Hammer horror films on TV in the early 1970s.
And so, I wanted to publish this short post in their memory: if it's very easy to hate many actors, it's impossible not to love these three.
Notes
Whilst Vincent Price and Christopher Lee shared the screen on only three occasions - and Price and Cushing appeared in just the one film together - Lee and Cushing were cast in over twenty films with each other and their collaborations were a significant feature of their careers: a full list of these films can be found here.
All three actors can be seen in Scream and Scream Again (dir. Gordon Hessler, 1970) and House of the Long Shadows (dir. Pete Walker, 1983).
The first of these films marks the second teaming - after The Oblong Box (1969) - of actors Price and Lee with director Gordon Hessler, although the iconic stars only share a brief scene in the film's climax, whilst Cushing, unfortunately, shares no screen time with either Price or Lee in his even shorter scene (essentially just a cameo appearance). Click here to watch the trailer.
As for House of the Long Shadows, a murderously funny British horror-mystery, it also starred the great American character actor John Carradine, who played Dracula in the Universal horror House of Frankenstein (1944), alongside Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr. Click here to watch the trailer.
