Tomorrow is my birthday.  My 47th.  I know… it’s sick!  The Golden Boy, the Internet enfant terrible, the wunderkind of The Movie Morlocks is creeping steadily towards retirement age!  I thought I’d spend my looming birthday in the company of some of my cinema heroes, and visit with them at or around the time that they too turned 47.

Sad to say, THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1925) star Lon Chaney, the Man of a Thousand Faces and father of THE WOLFMAN (1941) star Lon Chaney, Jr., was dying at the time he turned my age.  Lung cancer would claim his life in August of 1930, six months after his 47th birthday and on the cusp of starring in Universal’s planned film adaptation of DRACULA (released the following year).  In 1930, bowing to mounting pressure within the movie industry to make “talking” pictures, Chaney reluctantly remade his 1925 silent hit THE UNHOLY THREE, reprising his role as the duplicitous Professor Echo (aka Grandma O’Grady). He actually started shooting on his birthday, April 1st.  The production would be his only sound film and also his last.  The heretofore hale-n-hearty Chaney looks bowed by illness in this studio portrait, his normally intense eyes (usually the only thing he didn’t cover in makeup) fixed on a distant point as he (one might imagine) contemplates his own mortality.

Boris Karloff was a late life discovery, not appearing as the Monster in FRANKENSTEIN (1931) until he was in his 40s.  By the time of his 47th birthday, “Karloff the Uncanny” was a bona fide household word and was at the peak of his long and illustrious career, which found him doing his signature thing in the movies, on TV, on the radio, on stage and as a narrator of holiday specials and long playing records.  He turned 47 the year THE BLACK CAT and THE RAVEN (both 1934) had their premieres and was that age when he made THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935).  The career of the former Billy Pratt is reassuring to the late bloomer, suggesting the best could very well be yet to come.

Like Karloff, Bela Lugosi wouldn’t step into the wingtips of the undying Count Dracula until he was well into his 40s, almost 50 in fact.  At the time that he turned 47, in the fall of 1929, Lugosi was merely one emigre among many in Hollywood, playing bit parts and exotics.  Here he is in Fox’s SUCH MEN ARE DANGEROUS (1930), as an idealistic Berlin plastic surgeon who reluctantly turns fugly multimillionaire Warner Baxter (seen at left, in fugly makeup) into a handsome man.  Lugosi had already played Dracula on the stage by this point and his success in that role led to more prominent billing in this production (directed by Howard Hawks’ brother, who was killed during filming) than he had enjoyed previously. 

It tickles me endlessly that Vincent Price was 47 when he made THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959), my favorite of his films and one of my favorite-movies-ever.  He was this age when he made THE TINGLER (1959) too, and THE FLY (1958).  Like Boris Karloff, Vincent Price had decades of good work to his credit at the end of his long and useful life and this period, characterized by his collaborations with director/producer William Castle, was one of many high points.  I like to think of Price being at the top of his game here, at age 47, but I might be slightly prejudiced.

Peter Cushing turned 47 the year I was born, in 1961.  The somewhat fragile-looking but fit and surpassingly athletic Cushing had become an international film star with his star turn in Hammer Studios’ THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957).  While many (including his wife, Helen) counseled Cushing to avoid being typecast as a horror actor, he had endured too many lean years as a journeyman actor and took the work offered.  His reward?  The status of living legend long after many of his “legitimate” peers had retired and been forgotten, and an honor that remains his some 15 years after his death.  That’s Cushing above as CAPTAIN CLEGG (US: NIGHT CREATURES, 1962) – one of his best yet least heralded performances, as a daring rum smuggler who plies his trade under the noses of the Royal Navy disguised as a meek provincial vicar.

At the age of 47, Christopher Lee returned to the role that had made him world famous over a decade earlier… but instead of playing Dracula one more time for Hammer (for whom he had just shot TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA, the fourth sequel to Hammer’s 1958 “original” and the third requiring Lee’s nominal presence), he donned a white wig and silvery mustaches to play the part more or less as written by Bram Stoker, in Spanish director Jesus Franco’s EL CONDE DRACULA (1970).  It had been a dream of Lee’s to do Stoker right and while Franco’s take on the material takes more than a few liberties with Stoker’s classic, it does depict scenes and situations from the 1897 novel that no filmmaker had bothered with before.  At this point in his life, Lee’s creative choices may have been limited by simple economics and type casting but he was enjoying lots of free travel, jetting around the globe to appear in a wide range of unusual projects, including THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN (1969) with Ringo Star, ONE MORE TIME (1969) with Sammy Davis, Jr. and HANNIE CAULDER (1972) with Raquel Welch.  If the movies themselves left something to be desired, the wrap parties surely made the whole thing worth it.

I’ll finish with the celebrated, beloved but tortured author Edgar Allan Poe, a favorite of mine since childhood.  It seems I’ve always had a well-thumbed volume of Poe stuffed into a back pocket or close at hand.  Poe packed a lot of living into his limited lifetime and his collected tales of the grotesque and arabesque provided many of the actors above with a paycheck or two during theirs.  I’m thinking a lot about Poe’s great industry as a writer of fiction, poetry and literary criticism as I consider my own relatively meager output at the ripe old age of 47 and I come back to the same inescapable fact… that when Edgar A. Poe was my age he’d been dead for 7 years.  So Happy Birthday to me… and back to work.