Portal:Horror/Selected biography archive
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Purge cache to refresh this page
Contents |
[edit] Archive of Selected biography items
To nominate a biography, please do so here.
[edit] 2007
[edit] March 2007
Vincent Leonard Price Jr. Vincent Price is best remembered for his distinctive voice and serio-comic attitude in a series of distinctive horror films. His tall stature and polished urbane manner made him something of an American counterpart to the older Boris Karloff.
Price was born in St. Louis, Missouri to Vincent Leonard Price and Marguerite Willcox. His father was president of the National Candy Company, and his grandfather invented "Dr Price's Baking Powder"- the first commercially manufactured one. Vincent Jr. attended St. Louis Country Day School. He was further educated at Yale in art history and fine art. He was a member of Alpha Sigma Phi Fraternity and the Courtauld Institute, London. He became interested in theater in the 1930s, appearing professionally on stage from 1935. Price's adult height was 6 foot, 4 inches.
He made his film debut in 1938 with Service de Luxe and established himself as a competent actor, notably in Laura (1944),opposite Gene Tierney, directed by Otto Preminger. He also played Joseph Smith, Jr. in the movie Brigham Young (1940). During the 1940s, he appeared in a wide variety of films from straightforward drama to comedy to horror (he provided the voice of The Invisible Man at the end of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948). He was also active in radio, portraying the Robin Hood-inspired crimefighter Simon Templar, a.k.a. The Saint, in a popular series that ran from 1947 to 1951.
In the 1950s, he moved into horror films, enjoying a role in the successful curiosity House of Wax (1953), the first 3-D film to land in the year's top ten at the North American box office, and then the classic monster movie The Fly (1958). (continued)
[edit] February 2007
Clive Barker (born October 5, 1952) is an English author, film director and visual artist. Barker was born in Liverpool, England. Before reaching college, he went to the same schools as John Lennon. He studied English and philosophy at Liverpool University.
Barker is one of the leading authors of contemporary horror/fantasy, writing in the horror genre early in his career, mostly in the form of short stories (collected in Books of Blood 1 - 6), and the Faustian novel The Damnation Game (1986). Later he moved towards epic modern-day fantasy and urban fantasy with horror elements in Weaveworld (1987), The Great and Secret Show (1989), the world-spanning Imajica (1991) and Sacrament (1996), bringing in the deeper, richer concepts of reality, the nature of the mind and dreams, and the power of words and memories.
Barker's distinctive style is characterized by the notion of hidden fantastical worlds coexisting with our own (an idea he shares with contemporary Neil Gaiman), the role of sexuality in the supernatural and the construction of coherent, complex and detailed mythologies. Barker has referred to this style as "dark fantasy" or the "fantastique". His stories give equal time to the heavenly and awe-inspiring as to the hellish and horrific.
When the Books of Blood were first published in the United States in cheap paperback editions, the originality, intensity and overall quality of the stories led popular author Stephen King to say of Barker: "I have seen the future of horror and its name is Clive Barker." (This is a paraphrase of a famous quote said of Bruce Springsteen at the beginning of his career). Barker himself prefers not to be limited to the image of a gore and horror writer. (continued)
