Karloff as the monster in 1931’s “Frankenstein,” and with his daughter Sara (right) on the set of “Comedy of Terrors” in 1963. (Photo Courtesy of Sara Karloff)
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For a monster, Boris Karloff was a mensch.
“He was kind, he was gentle and wise, and a good listener,” says Sara Karloff, the only child of the legendary horror-film actor.
Now 72 — with a white streak through her dark hair she says has nothing to do with Elsa Lanchester’s Bride of Frankenstein — Sara’s been the keeper of her father’s flame, overseeing his image and getting him on three commemorative postage stamps since his death in 1969. She’ll be at the Museum of the Moving Image today, screening home movies of la vie Karloff in California, along with “Frankenstein,” the 1931 film that made her dad a monster star. “It was hardly an overnight success,” she says. By the time her father clumped around in those freaky boots, he’d been “a starving actor for 20 years.”
Boris Karloff was born William Henry Pratt in London in 1887, one of nine children of a diplomat, whose dark complexion — the legacy of an East Indian grandmother — made him stand out from school chums. Bent on a career in the theater, he went to British Columbia, where he acted in repertory productions, built sets and dug ditches for 10 years before making his way to Hollywood, where he dug more ditches between bit parts.
He was 44 and had appeared in 80 films before “Frankenstein” director James Whale discovered him in the commissary at Universal Pictures. “Bela Lugosi had turned down the role because it wasn’t a speaking part and he didn’t want to wear all that makeup,” Sara Karloff says.
Not only did her father endure lead-based makeup and 70 pounds of costuming, he also carried Dr. Frankenstein (Colin Clive) up Universal’s back wall in the summer heat of LA. “My father lost 20 pounds during the making of that film, and he’d already had a bad back!”
Not that she ever heard him complain. He was a very private man, she says: Only when her godmother, Cynthia Lindsay, wrote the biography “Dear Boris” — “Whenever she interviewed people, they’d preface their remarks by saying, ‘Ah, dear Boris!’ ” — did her family learn he’d been married not once but four times before he wed Sara’s mother, Dorothy Stine. After their divorce, he married his sixth and final wife, Evelyn Hope Helmore.
An only child, Sara was 7 when Karloff and Stine split up, but they were together long enough for him to impart a lesson she never forgot. “We had some close family friends who raised rabbits, and I wanted one so much,” she recalls. Given her pick of the litter, she passed up a bunny with a flopped-over ear in favor of a perfect specimen.
On the drive home, her father asked why she hadn’t chosen the one with the bent ear. He said that’s the one he would have picked.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because that’s the one that needed the most love.”
Karloff moved to New York in 1949, leaving Sara with her mother in Los Angeles. Her father and stepmother lived in the Dakota while he worked on Broadway and in TV. Private as he was, Karloff was horrified when he found himself the unwitting subject of “This Is Your Life.” Sitting in the TV audience, he saw his own life pass before his eyes.
“He said my stepmother sold him out for a washer and dryer,” recalls Sara, who says that children understood her father best. They recognized the man beneath the makeup.
“My father always said that kids got it — they weren’t afraid of the monster. They understood that he was the victim, not the perpetrator.”