Vincent Price’s acting career all started with a dare and culminated in one of the most iconic laughs in horror history.
The horror legend was in England studying for his master’s in art history at the University of London when a friend “dared” the 23-year-old to audition for “Chicago,” a play banned in the U.S. that the musical was later based upon, according to his daughter.
“He always wanted to be an actor,” Victoria Price told Fox News Digital of her father, a pop culture fixture during the Halloween season. “But he never got cast. So, then he went to London to study art history at the University of London … and he kept going to see plays. And somebody dared him to try out for a play, and that’s how he became an actor.”
Victoria said her father always wanted to be a character actor.
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“He was 6 foot 4, he was incredibly handsome and they cast him in these roles that he didn’t really like. So, he wanted to figure out how to be a character actor,” she said.
“The actors he admired were actors like Spencer Tracy and Edward G. Robinson and Jimmy Cagney, but he was 6 foot 4 and beautifully spoken and just ridiculously handsome as a young man. So, he found that being sort of a Gothic villain was his entrée into that in a play called “Angel Street” on Broadway and in movies like “Song of Bernadette” and “Laura,” sort of, but certainly all the film noirs, but mainly “Dragonwyck” in the ‘40s.
“And then that led into him being seen as ‘the heavy,’ but a certain kind of heavy, a beautifully spoken, eloquent kind of heavy. He was never going to be a gangster. And that led to ‘House of Wax.’”
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Victoria says her dad liked character acting because “the nice guys have no fun, and it just didn’t appeal to him. You know, there’s so much more meat in a villain. You know, the villain’s conflicts, his interactions with others. He did a lecture for years called ‘The Villains Still Pursue Me,’ and he wrote a lot of and spoke a lot of the appeal of the bad guy and how much we’re drawn to the bad guy.”
Her father’s appeal to audiences when he played a villain was a “hallmark of dad’s characters,” she said.
“You know, people loved my dad, and they rooted for him even as he was chopping off people’s heads or dumping them in vats of wax or, you know, he had this quality where you loved Vincent Price and you loved that he was scaring you. And, so, I think that was something that he was not unique in, of course, but really one of the best.
“He also loved doing comedy,” she says. “That’s why he did ‘The Carol Burnett Show,’ ‘Here’s Lucy.’ He did some wonderful movies that were comedies. And, obviously, things like ‘Get Smart’ and ‘Batman.‘ He was a funny, funny man. He was drawn to funny people. His friends were funny people, his wives were funny people. He was clever, he was witty.”
She added that “there is a very fine line between horror and humor, so that was something he played with a lot. You know, sometimes you don’t know whether to laugh or run screaming out of the room.”
Vincent’s narration in Michael Jackson’s thriller when the actor was in his 70s introduced him to a new generation of fans in the early 1980s.
“So, in that sense, it was fantastic.”
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“The only hard part was that he had a hard time getting parts that weren’t horror,” Victoria shared. “And we forget because horror is this hip, fabulous, huge moneymaking genre, that that’s not what horror was,” she noted. “Horror was B movies for kiddy, schlocky stuff. My dad was mocked by his peers, he was questioned.”
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But she says that the album, an all-time bestseller, guarantees his “immortality. As long as there’s Halloween, there’ll be ‘Thriller,’ and some kid is going to go, ‘Ah, that’s so cool. Who did that laugh?’ and find out about him.”
Victoria revealed the “House on Haunted Hill” star was also a “hilarious” practical joker at home, telling a story about how he once pranked her when she lost her first tooth.
“When I was about to lose my first tooth, we were on our way to New York, and I was really worried that I would lose my tooth and how would the Tooth Fairy know where I was, because I wanted that nickel, that very first nickel that I was going to get if I put my tooth under the pillow.
“So, I was obviously expressing this concern, and my dad was like, ‘Absolutely, the Tooth Fairy will know where you are.’ So, my tooth fell out. I’m in a hotel room in New York. I put it under the pillow, and I wake up the next morning, and I am so excited.
“I lift up my pillow to get my nickel and there is this disgusting, corroded denture. And he’d been saving that the whole time. And he could’ve totally let that go, you know. He had to carry that denture on the plane to New York,” she laughed, adding she wouldn’t have remembered losing her first tooth if she’d just gotten a nickel.
WATCH: VINCENT PRICE BECAME A ‘GOTHIC VILLAIN’ BECAUSE HE WANTED TO BE A CHARACTER ACTOR, DAUGHTER SAYS
While her father was busy with his career, she says they were “very close.”
“When I was writing the biography of him, I remember reading something Hedda Hopper wrote about. She was just listing all the things my dad was doing, and she said, ‘It’s a wonder baby Mary Victoria ever sees her father.’ You know, he was constantly working, constantly gone. So, I’m sure that sort of increased how close we were because when he came home, it was like boom, bonding time.”
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Her father loved to make Saturday morning pancakes when he was home, she told Fox News Digital, along with going to museums. But she said her favorite memory with him is driving around the country in their RV because he was part of the Department of the Interior’s Indian Arts and Crafts Board.
They would leave Los Angeles and head out to Indian reservations all over the country.
“It was just the three of us staying in motels and going to A&W Root Beer, stopping in places where I could ride horses or, you know, see rural America. And that was absolutely my favorite because it was just us and the dogs,” Victoria said of her dad and stepmom.
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He also cooked all the time when he was at home, and Price says even though she’s now gluten and dairy-free, if she had the chance, she would eat his cheese souffle “in a heartbeat. It was so good.”
“I didn’t know so much the person on the movie sets ’cause I didn’t go visit him much on movie sets,” she added. “I knew the art lover. I knew the cook. I knew the roller coaster rider. I knew the museumgoer, I knew the enthusiast, the man who loved deep sea fishing, you know, different things than other people saw.”
While her father wasn’t always able to spend Halloween with her as a kid because it was a busy time for him as a horror actor, she fondly remembers his playfulness when he did take her trick-or-treating.
“My girlfriends and I would run up eagerly to get the candy, and my dad would come along. And he would jump out and scare the owners, so he had fun with that,” she recalled with laugh.
Victoria says the most important lesson her father taught her was to live life with joy.
Looking back at a moment when she was 49 years old and feeling “miserable” about life, she ended up going on the road to talk about her father for what would have been his 100th birthday.
“And it changed my life because what I remembered was that my dad’s real lesson to me was joy, and joy I would define as the pure and simple delight in being alive.
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“That’s what he did every day. And that’s what I keep trying to do. That was the best part of growing up as Vincent Price’s daughter.”
Price, a writer and inspirational speaker who lives in North Carolina, also told Fox News Digital she is raising money to aid recovery in her home county of Henderson after Hurricane Helene.
“This is my small way of helping my community heal and come back stronger,” Price wrote in a press release about her efforts.
