Bela Lugosi was born Béla Ferenc Deszö Blaskó on October 20, 1882, in Lugos, Hungary. He was the son of a banker, Istvan, who kept a strict house. Bela ran away to the city of Resita at the age of eleven, never returning again to his hometown. There, he worked as a miner for a few years, but eventually began work in the theatre. He was given bit parts in plays, but was laughed off the stage most of the time.
He moved to Szadbadka, where he found his sister Vilma and his mother, who told him his father had died after losing the family savings. He entered school again in 1898, but stayed for only four months. It was back to the theatres for Bela.
After working on the railroad for some time, he joined a theatre company, and was adored by audiences. He was accepted into the Academy of Performing Arts, and it was during this period that he adopted the name "Lugosi." He began to play larger roles in larger plays, and he was eventually the top-billing member of the theater group.
In 1914, he enlisted in the Hungarian army. He was discharged in 1916 after convincing officials that he was "mentally unstable." Not soon after, he was married to Ilona Szmik on June 25, 1917. It was also during this time that he began appearing in movies. His first picture was A Leopárd, in which he played the lead role.
He was part of a Communist regime after the war, and as a result was placed on an arrest list of people who were also part of the group. He fled to Vienna in 1919, and soon after to Germany. He played parts in several German films, including Sklaven Fremedes Willens (1919) and Der Januskopf (1920). A little while later, Bela received a telegram from his wife Ilona. She had divorced him.
He emigrated to the United States of America in December of 1920. He wasted no time in falling in love with, marrying, and divorcing an actress named Ilona von Montágh. His first American film was 1923's The Silent Command, a suspenseful spy movie in which Bela played the bad guy. He officially became a US citizen on June 26, 1931.
He took on the role of Count Dracula in Horace Liveright's play in place of actor Raymond Huntley in 1929. It played for 33 weeks on Broadway, and also toured the entire West Coast. Soon after, the rights to play were picked up by Universal Studios. Universal wanted Lon Chaney, Sr. to play the lead role, but Chaney died of throat cancer in 1930. It wasn't until after Chaney's death that Bela was even considered for the part of Count Dracula. On July 27, 1929, Bela married Beatrice Woodruff Weeks. On July 30, 1929 Bela divorced Beatrice Woodruff Weeks. Weeks blamed Clara Bow, who Lugosi had had a brief love affair with a year earlier, for the breakup.
After much consideration and nagging (on the part of Bela), Lugosi was given the lead part in Dracula. He was paid a total of $3500, a fraction of what second-billed David Manners received. He skipped on the part of the monster in Universal's film version of Frankenstein, a decision which many think was his greatest mistake ever.
During the years after his role in Dracula, he appeared in many B-movies, some being above-average films and some being pathetic wastes of celluloid. Some highlights from this period in Bela's life include 1932's White Zombie, 1935's The Black Cat, Mark of the Vampire and The Raven. He married the 20 year-old Lillian Arch in January of 1931, this fourth marriage lasting 20 years. Bela Lugosi, Jr. was born on January 5th, 1938.
During the late thirties and througout the forties, Bela had a lot of trouble finding work. What little work he did find paid next to nothing and he was not sure how he would support his family. He and Lillian seperated for a while in August 1944, and finally divorced in 1951.
In the mid-fifties, Bela met up with a young writer-director-producer-actor named Edward D. Wood, Jr. Bela appeared in several of Wood's films, playing the lead only once, in 1955's Bride of the Monster as Dr. Eric Vornoff. The other two were Glen or Glenda? in 1953, and, after his death, in Plan 9 From Outer Space, the so-called "worst film of all time", in which Bela's scenes were taken from footage he and Wood shot for reasons currently unknown (some say it was for a film called The Ghoul Goes West, but none of the footage matches anything in Wood's script). The rest of his scenes were played by Wood's wife's chiropractor whose face was conveniently covered by a cape the entire time.
Bela had himself commited to the Los Angeles County General Hospital in April of 1955 to help him recover from a morphine addiction. He had been taking the drug for quite some time to ease shooting pains, as Bela put them, in his legs. He was released on August 3rd later that year, after passing an examination.
Not long after his release, he married Hope Lininger, a fan who had written him letters every for single day he was in hospital. She would be his fifth and final wife. Bela died at the age of 73, on August 16, 1956.