Dwight Frye

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Dwight Frye (1932)

Dwight Frye (born February 22, 1899 in Salina , Kansas , † November 7, 1943 in Los Angeles , California ; actually Dwight Iliff Fry ) was an American actor .

Life

Dwight Frye, who grew up in Colorado , studied music and was a talented concert pianist in his youth. In 1918, Frye joined the OD Woodward Company and became an actor on Broadway, where he specialized in comedic roles. In Hollywood, however, he was locked into neurotic and villainous characters. In Dracula he took on the role of Renfield, dominated by the title character, and in James Whales Frankenstein he played Fritz, the deformed and devious assistant to Dr. Frankenstein. Frye played the role of the more pitiful gangster Wilmer Cook in the first film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novel The Maltese Falcon , also in 1931.

Dwight Frye tried again and again to be able to play other characters, but since Dracula only got offers for murderers, grave robbers, mad scientists or other neurotic-murderous roles. When after 1936 the boom in horror films in Hollywood ended, Frye was offered almost only smaller roles, mostly without mentioning in the opening credits. As he progressed from one B-movie production to the next, Frye worked in between aircraft design assignments for the Lockheed Aircraft Company . When Frye was preparing for a role as Secretary of War in the feature film Wilson in 1943 , the actor unexpectedly died of a heart attack while on a bus ride at the age of only 44. He left behind his wife, Laura Mae Bullivant, with whom he had been married since 1928, and a child son.

After his death, his roles made Frye a minor horror film legend. The American shock rock singer Alice Cooper sang the song Ballad Of Dwight Fry on the album Love It To Death in 1971 . The song is from the perspective of a psychopath, thus targeting the roles rather than the personality of Dwight Frye. In his stage show, Alice Cooper still presents this song in a straitjacket to this day. Towards the end of the song he can free himself from this and kills his "overseer".

Filmography (selection)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Frye, Dwight
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fry, Dwight Iliff (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION US-American actor
DATE OF BIRTH February 22, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Salina , Kansas
DATE OF DEATH November 7, 1943
Place of death Los Angeles , California