Glenn Strange - Frankenstein's Monster

Frankenstein's Monster

In 1942, he appeared in The Mad Monster for PRC, a poverty row studio. In 1944, while Strange was being made up for an action film at Universal, make-up artist Jack Pierce noticed Strange's face and size would be appropriate for the role of the Monster. Strange was cast in House of Frankenstein in the role created by Boris Karloff in Frankenstein (1931), coached by Karloff personally after hours.

Strange recounted a personal anecdote in Ted Newsom's documentary, 100 Years of Horror (1996). On the set of House of Dracula (1945), Lon Chaney, Jr., got him extremely inebriated. In the scene in which the Monster is discovered in a dank cave, Strange lay immersed for hours in "quicksand" (which was actually cold mud) waiting for the cameras to roll and began to get a chill. Lon Chaney recommended that alcohol would keep Strange warm. Strange could barely walk after the day's shooting.

Strange played the Monster a third time in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), with Chaney and Bela Lugosi. Strange also appeared in character with Lou Costello in a haunted house skit on The Colgate Comedy Hour as well as making a gag publicity appearance as a masked flagpole-sitter for a local Los Angeles TV show in the 1950s. After weeks of the station teasing the public about the sitter's identity, Strange removed his mask and revealed himself as the Frankenstein Monster (actually, yet another mask.) Strange also played an ape-like monster in The Bowery Boys horror-comedy Master Minds in 1949, mimicking Huntz Hall's frantic comedy movements, with Hall providing his own dubbed voice.

During the wave of monster-related merchandising in the late 1950s and 1960s, it was usually Glenn Strange's iconic image used for the Monster on toys, games and paraphernalia, most often from his appearance in the Abbott & Costello film. In 1969, The New York Times mistakenly published Boris Karloff's obituary with Glenn Strange's picture as Frankenstein's monster.