Bela Lugosi played Dracula on Broadway before the 1931 film, learning the role phonetically because his English was limited, and the resulting cadence became the way the character sounds in every subsequent parody.
The typecasting was immediate and total. He turned down Frankenstein, which went to Karloff and made him the bigger star, and Lugosi spent the following decades in progressively cheaper productions.
He was open about his morphine addiction, committed himself for treatment publicly in 1955, and worked with Ed Wood at the end for almost nothing.
He was buried in the Dracula cape at his family’s request. The Frankenstein decision is one of the more consequential career choices in Hollywood history.
