fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

August 16, 1954: Death of Bela Lugosi, actor, union leader and participant in the 1919 Hungarian Revolution

Bela Lugosi, the actor world-famous as the face of Dracula, was born on Oct. 20, 1882. A distinguished actor on the Hungarian stage, he was a leader of the theatrical workers’ union and supporter of Béla Kun’s Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919. during the short-lived revolution, Lugosi authored a manifesto on revolutionary theater. Like many other leftists, he was forced into exile by the subsequent counter-revolution.

Lugosi was notoriously ill-treated by Hollywood despite his iconic performance in Dracula and other horror films. Along with fellow horror star Boris Karloff, Lugosi was a major force in the establishment of the Screen Actors Guild union during the Great Depression.

Although Lugosi was careful to keep his political affiliations on the down low, it’s likely that his revolutionary history was a cause of the well-documented hostility of Universal Studios boss Carl Laemmle, a right-wing German emigre, toward the star who saved his studio from bankruptcy in 1931. 

During World War II, Lugosi spoke at rallies to raise funds for the anti-fascist resistance in Hungary. It was during this time that he began his long battle against additiction to prescription painkillers.

Lugosi died impoverished in 1956, after being blacklisted by the major studios. He was famously buried in the Dracula cape that had brought him fame and become a typecasting curse.

It’s tempting to speculate what his career might have been like had he gone East instead of West … where he may have had the opportunity to work with revolutionary filmmakers like Eisenstein.