by Dr. Vincent Benjamin Daniel

I learned how to smile by watching Vincent Price. I was born hearing the sound of his voice, and my daddy, Dr. Duane Daniel, saw fit to give me his name. So I was destined to know the man like a buddy. He never made a blockbuster movie; he never was a major player like a Mel Gibson or a Harrison Ford, but he worked steadily in Hollywood, and people knew his films would be worth watching, if only to see him act. He could make you smile or he could scare the pants off you. He could hold his own with any co-star or director in the business. There is only one way to sum up Vincent Price: he had a way about him. He made a dent in the studio system as a tall, handsome character actor that co-starred in The Song of Bernadette, Laura, and The Three Musketeers. He was a suave guy, and he could throw a smoldering look like nobody's business. In 1953, a director named Andre de Toth cast Price in a remake of a seminal little thriller. He was jazzing it up with a process new to filmmaking called "3-D," and he was calling it House of Wax. For those of you new to the world, House of Wax was supposed to be a "horror" movie, and Vincent played the bad guy. That one role would change Price forever. He built a character that he would play for the rest of his life. Oh, sure, he would pop up every now and then in "big" movies, like his strange casting as the slavemaster in The Ten Commandments. Yet, for the most part, he stuck to the faithful fright films. And these were the films that made him a legend. The thing that made him just a touch better than everybody else in the genre, though, was his style. Vincent was always in control. He never played evil as a wild rampage. His quiet voice, softspoken at times, made him even scarier. He could render murder with a crooked little smile, and the silent violence of his narrowing eye-stare was so chilling it could throw frost over the gates of Hell. When Price hooked up with Roger Corman, it was like a marriage of souls. They made a slew of low-budget horror films, most of them bearing the title of an Edgar Allen Poe story, and they were a blast. Corman would boil up a script in a big black kettle, drop in some co-stars like a young Jack Nicholson or an aging Peter Lorre, add a pinch of film stock, and stir until a movie happened. The typecasting would follow him for the rest of his life. He once told an interviewer: "I sometimes feel like I'm impersonating the dark unconscious of the whole human race. I know this sounds sick, but I love it." Vincent Price picked up the gauntlet, and ran with it for the rest of his days. He got to act out some grim little fantasies, especially in the Dr Phibes movies and, my personal favorite, Theatre of Blood. He was our link to the dark side in all of us. Ironically, Price was nothing like the character he played. He was a gourmet cook, an author of cookbooks and art studies, and was one of the world's experts on modern art, lecturing at universities and museums throughout the world. The scariest man in the movies was a pussycat in real life. Finally, near the end of his life, he got the chance to play a character that was as close to his true self as any other. In the 1987 movie The Whales of August, he was cast as the courtly neighbor of two little old ladies, played by a wheelchair-bound Bette Davis and a frighteningly-old Lillian Gish. Price wore plaid knickers and high stockings, and in the words of Gish's character, is "the only man left in the world that still bowed" as a greeting. He would visit the ladies, talk, drink tea, and be on his way. My memory likes both pictures of Vincent. The quietly mad, blazing stare, icing me to my bones, and the artly gentleman, bowing his hellos and sipping tea while admiring an oil painting. One of my biggest regrets is that I never got to meet the man I was named for, if for no other reason than to tell him that his talent will never be forgotten, at least by one person.