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Pencils on paper 42×30 cm

William Henry Pratt (23 November 1887 – 2 February 1969), better known by his stage name Boris Karloff, was an English actor. Karloff is best remembered for his roles in horror films and his portrayal of Frankenstein’s monster in Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and Son of Frankenstein (1939), which resulted in his immense popularity. His best-known non-horror role is as the Grinch, as well as the narrator, in the animated television special of Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966). He also had a memorable role in the original Scarface (1932). Once Karloff arrived in Hollywood, he made dozens of silent films, but work was sporadic, and he often had to take up manual labour such as digging ditches or delivering construction plaster to earn a living.His role as Frankenstein’s monster in Frankenstein (1931) made Karloff a star. The bulky costume with four inch platform boots made it an arduous role but the costume and torturously administered makeup produced the classic image. The costume was a job in itself for Karloff with the shoes weighing 11 pounds (5 kg) each. Universal Studios was quick to acquire ownership of the copyright to the makeup format for the Frankenstein monster that Jack P. Pierce had designed. Karloff was lucky to get the part, as it had been originally cast with Bela Lugosi as the monster. A disastrous screen test, made for the producer Carl Laemmle Jr who reportedly laughed at the sight of Lugosi in the makeup, forced the change. A year later, Karloff played another iconic character, Imhotep in The Mummy. The Old Dark House (with Charles Laughton) and the starring role in The Mask of Fu Manchu quickly followed. These films all confirmed Karloff’s new-found stardom. Despite his terrifying roles, in private life he was very shy and polite.

Pencils on paper 42×30 cm

Carolyn Sue Jones (April 28, 1930 – August 3, 1983) was an American actress. Jones began her film career in the early 1950s, and by the end of the decade had achieved recognition with a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for The Bachelor Party (1957) and a Golden Globe Award as one of the most promising actresses of 1959. Her film career continued for another 20 years. In 1964 she began playing the role of Morticia Addams in the television series The Addams Family, receiving a Golden Globe Award nomination for her work. Morticia is the wife of Gomez Addams and mother of Wednesday Addams, Pugsley Addams and Pubert Addams. The character originated in the Charles Addams cartoons for The New Yorker magazine in the 1930s. In the cartoons, none of the family members had names. When the characters were adapted to the 1964 television series, Charles Addams gave her the name “Morticia”, implying “death” (derived from “mors”, genitive “mortis”, the Latin word for “death”, and perhaps also inspired by “mortician”). Morticia is described as a witch; she is slim, with extremely pale skin and long flowing straight black hair. She commonly wears black gothic dresses to match her hair, tightly form fitting, with a hobble skirt, with fringe of thick octupus-like cloth “tentacles” at the lower hem. As a child I was literally in love with Morticia Addams and Carolyn Jones was able to convey his character an incredible charm.

Pencils on paper 33×24 cm

Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó (20 October 1882 – 16 August 1956), better known as Bela Lugosi, was a Hungarian-American actor, famous for portraying Count Dracula in the original 1931 film and for his roles in various other horror films. He had been playing small parts on the stage in his native Hungary before making his first film in 1917, but had to leave the country after the failed Hungarian Revolution. He had roles in several films in Weimar Germany before arriving in America as a seaman on a merchant ship. In 1927, he appeared as Count Dracula in a Broadway adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel, where he was talent-spotted as a character actor for the new Hollywood talkies. He would appear in the classic 1931 Dracula by Universal Pictures. Through the 1930s, he occupied an important niche in popular horror films, with their East European setting, but his Hungarian accent limited his repertoire, and he tried unsuccessfully to avoid typecasting. Meanwhile, he was often paired with Boris Karloff, who was able to demand top billing. To his frustration, Lugosi was increasingly restricted to minor parts, kept employed by the studio principally for the sake of his name on the posters. By this time, Lugosi had been receiving regular medication for sciatic neuritis, and he became addicted to morphine and methadone. This drug dependence was noted by producers, and the offers eventually dwindled down to a few parts in Ed Wood’s low-budget movies. Lugosi died of a heart attack on August 16, 1956, while lying on a couch in his Los Angeles home. Lugosi was buried wearing one of the Dracula Cape costumes, per the request of his son and fifth wife, in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. His gestures and his hypnotic look  made him famous all over the world.

Pencils on paper 33×24 cm

Rosario Dawson (born May 9, 1979) is an American actress, singer, and writer. Dawson was born in New York City, New York. Her mother, Isabel Celeste, is a writer and singer who is of Puerto Rican and Afro-Cuban descent.  As a child, Dawson made a brief appearance on Sesame Street. At the age of 15, she was subsequently discovered on her front porch step by photographer Larry Clark and Harmony Korine, where Korine lauded her as being perfect for a part he had written in his screenplay that would become the controversial 1995 film Kids. She went on to star in varied roles, ranging from independent films to big budget blockbusters including Rent, He Got Game, and Men in Black II. She starred as Becky in 2006’s Clerks II, and mentioned in Back to the Well, the making-of documentary, that the donkey show sequence was what made her decide to take the role. She also appeared in the adaptation of the graphic novel Sin City, co-directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, portraying Gail, a prostitute-dominatrix. Also in that year, she appeared in a graphically violent scene in the Rob Zombie film The Devil’s Rejects. Though the scene was cut from the final film, it is available in the deleted scenes on the DVD release. In my personal opinion, the role of the prostitute Gail in the movie Sin City is memorable: “Shoot me now or get the hell out of my way.”

Pencils on paper 33×24 cm

Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock,  (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English film director and producer. Often nicknamed “The Master of Suspense”, he pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, renowned as England’s best director, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood in 1939 and became a US citizen in 1955. Over a career spanning more than half a century, Hitchcock fashioned for himself a distinctive and recognisable directorial style. He pioneered the use of a camera made to move in a way that mimics a person’s gaze, forcing viewers to engage in a form of voyeurism. Hitchcock directed more than fifty feature films in a career spanning six decades. Psycho is almost certainly Hitchcock’s best-known film.Produced on a constrained budget of $800,000, it was shot in black-and-white on a spare set using crew members from his television show “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”. The unprecedented violence of the shower scene, the early death of the heroine, the innocent lives extinguished by a disturbed murderer became the defining hallmarks of a new horror movie genre and have been copied by many authors of subsequent films. Hitchcock died at age 80 in his Bel Air home of renal failure.