On November 7, 1943, Dwight Frye—a “tired and bloated” graveyard shift employee at Douglas Aircraft—boarded a bus home from the glittering Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, where he had just taken his wife and son to see Sherlock Holmes Faces Death. The bus hadn’t even pulled away from the curb, his son later recalled, “when my Dad fell right in the middle of the aisle.” It’s doubtful that anyone on board realized the weary man who had collapsed in front of them was a horror movie legend. Once upon a time, Frye was known as the “man of a thousand deaths”—someone whose portrayals of “half-wits, lunatics and moon-maddened neurotics” caused even hardened film critics like Pauline Kael to find themselves “suddenly squealing and shrieking.”
His iconic role as the fly-eating Renfield in Tod Browning’s 1931 classic Dracula—a part reimagined by Nicholas Hoult in Universal’s Renfield, out Friday—cemented his place in the pantheon of pop culture. For Frye, though, the role was a dream job that led to a decade-long nightmare.
Dwight lliff Frye was born on February 22, 1889, in Salina, Kansas. According to the authorized biography Dwight Frye’s Last Laugh (cowritten by Gregory William Mank, James T. Coughlin, and Frye’s son, Dwight D. Frye), his parents were upright farmers and devout Christian Scientists who coddled their precocious only child.
The Frye family soon moved to Denver, Colorado, where the young Dwight, a piano prodigy, became known as a handsome musical genius. He joined a musical comedy troupe and toured the country on the Pantages vaudeville circuit before being discovered by Broadway producer-director Brock Pemberton.
Courtesy of Everett Collection
By 1922, the intense, charming Frye debuted on Broadway in the farce The Plot Thickens, playing a bumbling robber. He would play a variety of Broadway roles over the next few months. In 1932, a heady Frye sent a telegram to his parents: “Have Signed Five Year Contract With Pemberton Everything Going Fine Letter Explaining No More Worry Dreams Coming True My Love.”
True stardom came to Frye in 1925 through the Broadway drama A Man’s Man, in which he played a weak, striving young husband. In this role, Frye displayed the intensity that would later make him so perfect as demented horror characters—and help typecast him for life.
“I thought Dwight was … odd, strange,” his costar Josephine Hutchinson recalls in Dwight Frye’s Last Laugh. “He was so imbued with working on his part that he wasn’t very communicative to his fellow players. When he was in the theatre, all he thought about was his performance. Now, all these years later, I realize: Dwight really was the original ‘Method’ actor.”
For a time, everything seemed to be straight out of a fairy tale. In 1928, Frye married his wife Laura, a kind, gentle actress whom he had originally worked with out West. He was lauded as a “future [blonde] John Barrymore,” receiving rave reviews as he performed alongside rising luminaries Miriam Hopkins, Fredric March, Humphrey Bogart, and Dracula himself, Bela Lugosi.
But like many young Broadway stars, Frye wanted more. In 1929, he and Laura moved to Hollywood, which was desperately in need of theatrically-trained voices for the new talkies. That year, he starred in Rope’s End at the Vine Street Theater in Los Angeles, playing a young murderer in a play inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case.
It may have been the wrong choice, and Frye seemed to know it. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, an argumentative Frye fought against being typed as a “troubled weakling.”
“I am a character man,” he told the paper. “There seems to be an impression I do one type of thing. I don’t and I haven’t. One of my first successes was in comedy…. I don’t like specialization. I have no interest in anything but character work, and I have made it a point to vary my roles as much as possible.”
Work in movies came quickly. After turns in the James Cagney film The Doorway to Hell and The Maltese Falcon, he started work on Dracula.
Hadley Hall Meares
Source link
