Béla Lugosi
Béla Lugosi (20 October 1882 – 16 August 1956) was a Hungarian-American actor of stage and screen, well known for playing Count Dracula in the Broadway play and subsequent film version. In the last years of his career he featured in several of Ed Wood’s low budget films. Lugosi, the youngest of four children, was born as Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó in Lugos outside the western border of Transylvania, at the time part of Austria–Hungary (now Lugoj, Romania), to Paula de Vojnich and István Blasko, a banker.
Lugosi’s first film appearance was in the 1917 movie Az ezredes 
(known in English as The Colonel). When appearing in Hungarian silent films he used the stage name Arisztid Olt. Lugosi would make twelve films in Hungary between 1917 and 1918 before leaving for Germany. Following the collapse of Béla Kun’s Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, left-wingers and trade unionists became vulnerable. Lugosi was proscribed from acting due to his participation in the formation of an actor’s union. In exile in Germany, he began appearing in a small number of well received films, including adaptations of the Karl May novels, Auf den Trümmern des Paradieses (On the Brink of Paradise), and Die Todeskarawane (The Caravan of Death), opposite the ill-fated Jewish actress Dora Gerson.
A number of factors worked against Lugosi’s career in the mid-1930s. Universal changed management in 1936, and per a British ban on horror films, dropped them from their production schedule; Lugosi found himself consigned to Universal’s non-horror B-film unit, at times in small roles where he was obviously used for “name value” only. Throughout the 1930s Lugosi, experiencing a severe career decline despite popularity with audiences (Universal executives always preferred his rival Karloff), accepted many leading roles 
from independent producers like Nat Levine, Sol Lesser, and Sam Katzman. These low-budget thrillers indicate that Lugosi was less discriminating than Boris Karloff in selecting screen vehicles, but the exposure helped Lugosi financially if not artistically. Lugosi tried to keep busy with stage work, but had to borrow money from the Actors’ Fund to pay hospital bills when his only child, Bela George Lugosi, was born in 1938.
Through his association with Dracula (in which he appeared with minimal makeup, using his natural, heavily accented voice), Lugosi found himself typecast as a horror villain in such movies as Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Raven, and Son of Frankenstein for Universal, and the independent White Zombie. His accent, while a part of his image, limited the roles he could play.
