Bela Lugosi died fifty-five years ago today of a coronary occlusion at the age of 73. He was discovered in bed by his fifth wife, Hope, upon her return from work. Although he was all but forgotten in his later years, his death was deemed newsworthy enough for a photographer to rush to his apartment to snap a photograph of his body being wheeled away by the undertakers.
Geza Kende’s magnificent portrait looks on as Bela’s body is removed from his apartment
Hope told the press, “He was terrified of death. Towards the end he was very weary, but he was still afraid of death. Three nights before he died he was sitting on the edge of the bed. I asked him if he were still afraid to die. He told me that he was. I did my best to comfort him, but you might as well save your breath with people like that. They’re still going to be afraid of death.”
Bela’s death generated few in-depth obituaries. Most notices were embarrassingly brief, with the majority focusing on his much publicized addiction to drugs, which came to light when he publicly committed himself to the Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, California the previous April.
The funeral plaque displayed at Bela’s funeral
Bela’s funeral service was held at 2:30p.m. on Saturday August 18th at the Utter-McKinley Mortuary Chapel on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. Prior to the service, his body lay in state in full Dracula garb. Although Hope told the press that “it was his wish” to be buried in his famous costume, it was actually the decision of Bela’s ex-wife Lillian and their son Bela Jnr.
Bela photographed lying in state in the Strother Chapel of the Utter McKinley Mortuary by his teenage friend, David Katzman
The funeral service was a relatively small affair, conspicuous by the absence of Hollywood “big” names. In addition to Hope, Lillian and Bela Lugosi Jnr., those who attended included Zoltan Korda, filmmaker Edward D. Wood and his wife Kathy, Glen or Glenda producer George Weiss, Forest J Ackerman, and actors Carroll Borland, Tor Johnson, Paul Marco, Conrad Brooks, Dudley Manlove and Loretta King.
Bela’s funeral book, pallbearer card and newspaper clippings
Contrary to popular myth, Lillian Lugosi, not Frank Sinatra, paid for the funeral and the plot in Holy Cross Cemetery. Hope paid for the coffin.
Don Marlowe, Bela’s former agent, back left, and Edward D. Wood, back right, carry Bela’s casket from the mortuary.
Marlowe was not an official pallbearer. Moments before Bela’s casket was taken from the Utter McKinley Mortuary, he pushed aside pallbearer Richard Sheffield, one of Bela’s teenage friends, to ensure he was photographed by the waiting press.
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A selection of newspaper reports and obituaries
The Vancouver Sun, August 17, 1956
Taunton Daily Gazette, Massachusetts, August 17, 1956
Evening Standard, August 17, 1956
American newspaper, August 18, 1956
BELA LUGOSI SHROUD TO BE DRACULA CAPE
Bela Lugosi will be buried today wrapped in the black cape of Dracula, the horror character that brought the greatest fame of his long acting career.
“It was his wish,” explained his widow, Mrs. Hope Lininger Lugosi.
Prior to this dramatic burial, funeral services for the veteran 74-year-old actor will be conducted at 2:30p.m. today at the Utter-McKinley Mortuary Chapel , 6240 Hollywood Blvd. The interment will be at Holy Cross Cemetery. The body will lie in state at the mortuary until an hour before the services.
Daily Mirror, August 18, 1956
American newspaper August 18, 1956
The Times, August 18, 1956
The Stage, August 23, 1956
Bela Lugosi, the Hungarian actor died in Hollywood on August 16, aged 67. He was a leading actor on the Budapest stage before 1914, being notable as Hamlet, Cyrano and Liliom. At the end of the war of 1914-18 he went to the United States where, after playing in and producing various Hungarian plays, he appeared on the English-speaking stage in New York in 1920 as Fernando in “The Red Poppy.” In 1927 he scored an outstanding success as creator of the title-role in “Dracula” at the Fulton, and later appeared in the film version. After doing much film-work in Hollywood, he returned to the stage in 1944, touring the United States as Jonathan Brewster in “Arsenic and Old Lace.”
The Strait times (Singapore) September 2, 1956
DRACULA DIES IN A PRIVATE HELL
AT THE FINISH A PAUPER AND A DRUG ADDICT
AN APPRECIATION BY RENE MacColl
CHICAGO, Sat.
I ALWAYS want people to live and die strictly in character.
The news that 73-year-old Bela Lugosi, the man who created a really terrifying projection of the vampire Count Dracula, has died a pauper and a drug addict in Los Angeles seems fitting.
Maybe if they were revived now Lugosi’s films would cause only laughs.
Maybe we are all wiser and more sophisticated these days.
But I can tell you when I first clapped eyes on the screen Dracula all those years ago, Lugosi was as convincing and terrifying as a serpent dangling from a tree.
And when he transformed himself into a vampire bat and started working his way up the walls of his repulsive Transylvanian castle, you accepted it unquestioningly. It was hokum, but hokum in the grandest style.
What an extraordinary life the man led! The origins were a bit like that other splendid old-timer, Eric von Stroheim.
Like Stroheim, Lugosi was an officer in the Austro-Humgarian imperial forces during World War One.
Like Stroheim, after the swords had been hung up Lugosi came to America.
Her hit Broadway in the mid 1920s. In ’27 came the start of the climax – Dracula. I did not see him in it on the stage, but it must have taken tremendous virtuosity to het away with it in the living theatre.
But it was the film which really landed him in the select – and highly profitable – company of ghouls, ghosts, werewolves, and robots. Audiences screamed. People fainted. There were complaints of insomnia from the more impressionable. Yes, Dracula was the high spot.
The descent was slow – the descent into a private hell of his own.
The offers of parts came to a halt. Suddenly the man from Hungary was in his sixties and the shadows were lengthening. In a world of Buchenwald and Belsen it did not make sense to produce horror films any more.
To escape from the misery of stony-faced agents, friends who turned their backs, swanky restaurant doormen who told him to “get going, Bud,” Lugosi retreated into a world of dreams which may have been as awful as the other world of which he had given us all a glimpse for three and nine-pence.
Cheap lodging houses. The phone which never rang. Drugs.
A year ago he threw in the sponge publically and asked to be admitted to the California State Hospital for a cure. When he came out he said: “I am cured – forever.”
“Forever,” as far as Lugosi was concerned, meant just eight months more.
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