Vincent Leonard Price Jr. was an American actor and cultural personality best known for his roles in horror films throughout the mid-20th century.
Born in 1911 in St. Louis, Missouri, Price had a wealthy upbringing owing to his father, who owned the lucrative National Candy Company, and his father’s father, who invented the first cream of tartar-based baking powder. In fact, his family could trace its lineage back to Peregrine White, who was born on the Mayflower itself while it was still in the Provincetown Harbor in Massachusetts, making White the first child born in the Massachusetts Colony.
Price attended prestigious private schools as a child, going on to graduate from Yale University in 1933 with a degree in English and a minor in art history. He wrote for the Yale Record, a student humor magazine, and taught for a year after graduation before enrolling in an art school in London to pursue a master’s degree in fine arts. While in London, however, Price fell in love with the stage, and within a year had become a professional actor in plays such as Chicago and Victoria Regina, before moving to New York City to spend the better part of a decade performing on Broadway.
Starting in the late 1930s, Price also began appearing in films as a character actor, such as in Service de Luxe, Laura, and Wilson. He also portrayed Mormonism founder Joseph Smith in the 1940 film Brigham Young. But it was in the horror genre that Price truly made a name for himself, beginning with his appearance in the Boris Karloff film Tower of London. Price would go on to perform in horror classics including House of Wax, The Fly, House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler, House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, Tales of Terror, The Raven, The Masque of the Red Death, The Last Man on Earth, Witchfinder General, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, and Theater of Blood.
Beyond his life as an actor, Price had a great many talents and interests. He founded the Vincent Price Art Museum with his wife, deliberately establishing it within a community college to help make fine art more accessible to everyday people and donating thousands of items from his own personal collection. Audio of Price’s narrations and dialogue has been incorporated into several pieces of music, which earned Price three Grammy nominations: in 1959, 1974, and 2018.
Price was also a gifted chef who published a number of cookbooks including A Treasury of Great Recipes, Cooking Price-Wise, and Mary and Vincent Price’s Come Into the Kitchen Cook Book, and even hosted a cooking show in 1971, also called Cooking Price-Wise. Later in his career, Price hosted BBC Radio’s horror and mystery series, The Price of Fear.
Price’s distinctive eyebrows, spooky voice, and signature mustache have come to define the horror genre. He accumulated over 200 acting credits, dozens of which were starring roles — mostly horror — and even contributed a monologue to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video in 1983.
His career earned him lifetime achievement awards from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA, in 1986; the Los Angeles Film Critics Association in 1991; and the Bram Stoker Awards in 1994. In 1960, he also earned a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Price died in 1993 at the age of 82.