He also decided on a stage name, a Slavic collision of a surname from his mother's Russian ancestry and a first name that seemed dramatically appropriate.

Boris Karloff's first professional gig was playing a character nearly three times his age, and he was so awful that years later he joked that he was on salary at $30 when the curtain went up and $15 when it came back down. Funny, yes, but also quite true.

For the next seven years he persisted at his craft while touring with various theatre companies, at one point playing 106 different roles in a 53-week run in North Dakota. Though he was gaining important experience in the field he loved most, he was also fortunate enough to realize that he was not leading man material. From the outset, he understood that he was to play character roles and heavies, and his sense of place and contentment with that knowledge allowed him to remain patient and purposeful in his work. He wasn't spinning his wheels waiting to graduate to dashing leads for which he would be all wrong. He was, though, unknowingly laying the foundation for a time to come in which the heavy was the lead.

Few realize how long and how hard Karloff had to work before seeing such a time. He made his first film appearance as an extra in a Douglas Fairbanks film in 1918, while touring with a theatre company in Los Angeles. His strange look lent itself to the medium and he continued to balance both theatre and film jobs regularly, if mostly unspectacularly, until his minor role as the looming convict Galloway in the New York stage production of THE CRIMINAL CODE (1930) led to his reprising the part for Howard Hawks' film version. The scene in which he murders a stoolpigeon is classic Karloff, providing menacing gait and a brutish brow as he corners his victim, then slowly closes a wooden door in our faces, effectively obscuring the ugly violence we are forced to play out in our own minds. Film roles were coming at a clip now, playing opposite both Lionel and John Barrymore, Laurel and Hardy, E.G. Robinson, and even trying to sell dope to 10-year old Jackie Cooper (in 1931's YOUNG DONOVAN'S KID).

One fateful day in 1931, director James Whale saw contract player Boris Karloff having lunch in the studio commissary and was fascinated with the shape of the actor's head. Lugosi and original director Robert Florey had already been "awarded" MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE as a consolation prize for being respectively too proud and too bossy for the project, so Whale's choice of a working actor whom the public did not know as a star solidified the course of Karloff's remaining 37 years in the business. FRANKENSTEIN had it's Monster.

It was Boris Karloff's 70th film. (Or 81st, depending on where you check.) After enduring the hours and hours of secretive and grueling make-up sessions by Jack Pierce, only to have his name replaced with a"?" in the opening credits as part of the studio's publicity angle, the actor who stunned audiences with his horrifically sympathetic Monster wasn't even invited to the premiere. Taking Lugosi's oft-quoted dismissal of the role as one in which any extra could grunt, the studio had no idea who audiences would see as the real star of this hugely successful and very controversial horror film. Karloff had touched a nerve.

Horror had itself a new King, yet replete with a British accent and a pronounced lisp there must have been some concern as to how to cast him in talkies. Audiences' first opportunity to hear the newly-crowned horror star speak came in MGM's kinky MASK OF FU MANCHU (1932), then Universal grabbed him back and gave him Ardath Bey, a wrinkled parchment of the Egyptian undead, who didn't "like to be touched," in THE MUMMY (1932).

Karloff never approved of the word "horror," as he saw that word's purpose to "repulse," something he never tried to do. It's more a semantic quibble than an argument of merit, but one can't help appreciate the distinction he was attempting to make. At his best, he gave his monsters, both mortal and immortal, remarkable shades of understanding, be it the

agonizing loneliness of his creature in THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) or the ugly little man who unleashed his self-hate on the wretched inside the dark walls of BEDLAM (1946).

Boris was a private man who would end up marrying five times, who loved his cricket and raised turkeys on his farm, fully avoiding the Hollywood social scene, though eager to lend a hand when it would benefit his fellow thespians. To that end, he became a founding member of the Screen Actor's Guild.

He was mortified of going back on the stage, though was finally convinced to do so and met much acclaim in the Broadway production of ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (which ran so long that when the film was hurriedly made the studio had to use Raymond Massey). He has been quoted assaying that a career high point was playing the insistently non-horrific role of Bishop Cauchon in THE LARK, opposite Julie Harris, a role he repeated for television. He would also play Captain Hook in a stage production of PETER PAN. When once asked why he didn't play the "real" classics, the humble actor told the reporter that he simply wasn't talented enough to do Shakespeare.

Wheel-chair ridden and suffering from respiratory illness, Boris Karloff worked in all the available mediums of his profession right up until the very end. He died, age 81, in 1969.

Grandfatherly, his lisping oration of DR. SEUSS' HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS (1966) remains an annual television favorite for legions of little boys and girls yet to discover it is the very same voice of the Monster from whom they will one day learn compassion and understanding in the face of ignorant fear and hatred.

Here follows my list of the TOP FIVE KARLOFF FILMS, with due respect given his performances in THE MASK OF FU MANCHU (1932), THE MUMMY (1932), THE BLACK ROOM (1935), TOWER OF LONDON (1939), ISLE OF THE DEAD (1944), BEDLAM (1946), THE RAVEN (1963), COMEDY OF TERRORS (1963), and THE SORCERERS (1967).

FRANKENSTEIN (1931): Ever the gentleman, Karloff would often say that it was make-up master Jack Pierce who created the Monster and that he was only the lucky stiff who got to play "the dear old boy." Director James Whale probably deserves much of the credit, but Karloff's stilted, childishly awkward, pleading gestures and countered fits of temperamental rage gave the Monster eternal screen life. Beneath thick patties of putty that weighted down his eyelids, threatening to obscure one of a screen actor's most important tools-his eyes-Boris manages to communicate panic, confusion, and genuine hurt through a mask designed to frighten and repel.

No, Karloff cannot be awarded the genius of conceiving the Monster as a sympathetic lost soul, an innocent child spurned by its father and the world into which it was brought (Shelley did so in the original story), but he can justly be awarded the distinction of having realized it so beautifully, so evocatively.

THE BLACK CAT (1934): With even less to do with Poe than the AIP films of the sixties, this bizarre horror classic was the first teaming of Karloff and Bela Lugosi (which is precisely how they were billed) and remains a favorite among fans, even though it was never really completed and comes with several peculiar plot discrepancies. Karloff is granted a memorable introduction, provided in silhouette as his alarmingly gaunt frame rises stiff-as-a-board from his bed, and thereafter makes a striking impression with his geometrically-planed scalp and coldly articulated vocal incantations. His lisp may have never been put to finer use. Boris' Hjalmar Poelzig is not only a war criminal of some foul repute, but he is also a new wave architect whose striking art deco mansion makes for a nouveau setting to hold satanic Black Masses. This was the first film in which he demonstrates how fully cultivated and aware he was of his powers as a Hollywood (horror) star. No wonder that Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey counted Karloff's work here as the very best of Hollywood's devilish representatives.

THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935): He adamantly protested allowing the Monster to speak in this superior sequel to the original film, and never changed his mind about that, but Boris was wrong and we're the better for Whale's not giving in to the actor's sensibility. This may be the pinnacle achievement of the 1930's Golden Age of Horror, as it turns the infant Hollywood horror genre on its ear with witty dialogue, liberal doses of black humor, nearly sacrilegious imagery, and top-notch performances by all. Boris gives his Monster warmth and humor and striking notes of melancholia ("I love dead, hate living") on his way to the most sensationally humiliating first date in movie history. Every scene is a classic, and this is the work from which all others borrow and pay homage.

THE BODY SNATCHER (1945): Without a doubt, this Val Lewton-Robert Wise classic contains the best performance Boris Karloff ever committed to film. His most literate role in terms of a script, John Gray is a sordid man whose entrances are forebode by the clip-clopping of his white horse as it draws his black carriage over the cobble-stoned streets and alleyways of Edinburgh. He is a cabman by trade and a bodysnatcher by circumstance.

Karloff paints him in smoky greys; this is sinister with a leering smile that breaks into a big mocking grin, eating at the soul of the doctor for whom he provides medical subjects-both from the grave and fresh off the streets. Karloff inhabits Gray, finding creepy nuance in the paradox of his outward geniality and good spirits. Beneath this shallow facade lies a cruel, vengeful man whose dismal life remains inspired only so long as he can torment another wealthy enough to believe he can avoid paying the consequences of his own moral corruption.

TARGETS (1968): Not only did first-time director Peter Bogdanovich give Karloff his last good role, but in many ways it was designed as an autobiographical tribute, allowing Boris to play aging horror star Byron Orlok, who wishes to retire from making cheesy monster movies in an increasingly sick and violent real world with which he cannot compete.

"I'm an anachronism," he grumbles in a performance that captures both gentle spirit and crotchety cynicism. The considerable low budget shows, but the script is excellent and Bogdanovich makes the most of it. The tale of a retiring horror movie star countered with the tale of a disaffected Vietnam vet who ends up sniping through the screen at drive-in patrons finds particular resonance in 1968. It is an indictment of the Sears catalog American family mythology of the fifties and the monster-among-us reality of the torsioned sixties, rending apathetic violence out of domestic banality. For his part, Boris was terribly nervous about having to do a 95 second monologue in the middle of the picture. Bogdanovich wanted to do the whole thing without cutting, having the camera slowly track toward the actor as he recites an ironic tale of the macabre. The Master needn't have fret. He did it in one take.