The Real Renfield: How ‘Dracula’ Broke Classic Hollywood Star Dwight Frye - Vanity Fair

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As Renfield hits theaters, we remember the actor who first brought the character to life—and how Dracula led to his downfall.

By Hadley Hall Meares

April 14, 2023

On November 7, 1943, Dwight Frye—a “tired and bloated” graveyard shift employee at Douglas Aircraft—boarded a bus home from the glittering Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, where he had just taken his wife and son to see Sherlock Holmes Faces Death. The bus hadn’t even pulled away from the curb, his son later recalled, “when my Dad fell right in the middle of the aisle.” It’s doubtful that anyone on board realized the weary man who had collapsed in front of them was a horror movie legend. Once upon a time, Frye was known as the “man of a thousand deaths”—someone whose portrayals of “half-wits, lunatics and moon-maddened neurotics” caused even hardened film critics like Pauline Kael to find themselves “suddenly squealing and shrieking.”

His iconic role as the fly-eating Renfield in Tod Browning’s 1931 classic Dracula—a part reimagined by Nicholas Hoult in Universal’s Renfield, out Friday—cemented his place in the pantheon of pop culture. For Frye, though, the role was a dream job that led to a decade-long nightmare.

Dwight lliff Frye was born on February 22, 1889, in Salina, Kansas. According to the authorized biography Dwight Frye’s Last Laugh (cowritten by Gregory William Mank, James T. Coughlin, and Frye’s son, Dwight D. Frye), his parents were upright farmers and devout Christian Scientists who coddled their precocious only child.

The Frye family soon moved to Denver, Colorado, where the young Dwight, a piano prodigy, became known as a handsome musical genius. He joined a musical comedy troupe and toured the country on the Pantages vaudeville circuit before being discovered by Broadway producer-director Brock Pemberton.

Courtesy of Everett Collection

By 1922, the intense, charming Frye debuted on Broadway in the farce The Plot Thickens, playing a bumbling robber. He would play a variety of Broadway roles over the next few months. In 1932, a heady Frye sent a telegram to his parents: “Have Signed Five Year Contract With Pemberton Everything Going Fine Letter Explaining No More Worry Dreams Coming True My Love.”

True stardom came to Frye in 1925 through the Broadway drama A Man’s Man, in which he played a weak, striving young husband. In this role, Frye displayed the intensity that would later make him so perfect as demented horror characters—and help typecast him for life.

“I thought Dwight was … odd, strange,” his costar Josephine Hutchinson recalls in Dwight Frye’s Last Laugh. “He was so imbued with working on his part that he wasn’t very communicative to his fellow players. When he was in the theatre, all he thought about was his performance. Now, all these years later, I realize: Dwight really was the original ‘Method’ actor.”

For a time, everything seemed to be straight out of a fairy tale. In 1928, Frye married his wife Laura, a kind, gentle actress whom he had originally worked with out West. He was lauded as a “future [blonde] John Barrymore,” receiving rave reviews as he performed alongside rising luminaries Miriam Hopkins, Fredric March, Humphrey Bogart, and Dracula himself, Bela Lugosi.

But like many young Broadway stars, Frye wanted more. In 1929, he and Laura moved to Hollywood, which was desperately in need of theatrically-trained voices for the new talkies. That year, he starred in Rope’s End at the Vine Street Theater in Los Angeles, playing a young murderer in a play inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case.

It may have been the wrong choice, and Frye seemed to know it. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, an argumentative Frye fought against being typed as a “troubled weakling.”

“I am a character man,” he told the paper. “There seems to be an impression I do one type of thing. I don’t and I haven’t. One of my first successes was in comedy…. I don’t like specialization. I have no interest in anything but character work, and I have made it a point to vary my roles as much as possible.”

Work in movies came quickly. After turns in the James Cagney film The Doorway to Hell and The Maltese Falcon, he started work on Dracula.

Courtesy of Everett Collection

As Dwight Frye’s Last Laugh notes, the filming of Dracula was an odd affair. While director Tod Browning appeared bored and disinterested, the eccentric Bela Lugosi stayed firmly in character throughout the shoot. Other cast members seemed constantly amused by the entire spectacle, while Frye approached his role of Renfield, the dapper real estate agent turned crazed spider-eating minion, with customary intensity, spouting out iconic lines with, at times, comic hysteria.

Dracula was a sensation, and the films taboo occult themes drummed up even more box office. Frye’s role, in particular, evokes a timeless terror that inspired Alice Cooper to write 1971’s “Ballad of Dwight Fry,” which Cooper still performs in a straitjacket. “He was always, to me, by far the most psychotic of any character in all those old horror movies,” Cooper recalls in Welcome to My Nightmare: The Alice Cooper Story. “He was this little shaky guy … I mean everything he said sent shivers down your spine.”

The motley crew at Universal almost immediately started their next project: an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, directed by James Whale and staring Boris Karloff as the “Monster.” This time, Frye was cast as Fritz, the hunchbacked henchman to Colin Clive’s Dr. Frankenstein. According to Dwight Frye’s Last Laugh:

In the morning, as he reported to … the makeup bungalow, Dwight … was quiet, charming and might even make a joke. However, once in makeup (and under hump), he would skulk about the soundstage — and “scare the hell out of everyone!” Indeed, Dwight between takes was … “sometimes more frightening than the Monster”; this was understandable, since the “Monster,” at his leisure, was likely to relax in his beach chair, light up a cigarette, sip his tea and sing a Cockney ditty.

The die was cast. By the time Frye appeared as the “village idiot” Herman in 1933’s The Vampire Bat, he was openly complaining about the roles being offered to him. “If God is good,” he wrote in the film’s press book. “I will be able to play comedy, in which I was featured on Broadway for eight seasons and in which no producer of motion pictures will give me a chance! And please, God, may it be before I go screwy, playing idiots, half-wits, and lunatics on the talking screen!”

It was not to be. “Once prized for his range and versatility,” David J. Skal writes in his book Hollywood Gothic, “Frye was typecast as the prototypical monster’s assistant. Wild-eyed, hunchbacked, or zoophagous, Dwight Frye became a subgenre unto himself.”

Courtesy of Everett Collection

As his biographers note, it was an odd career for a happily married, practicing Christian Scientist who went to services weekly, spent months making handmade plywood Christmas cards, and diligently kept up his piano practice.

But Frye was lucky to have any job in the midst of the Depression—be it a tiny part as a reporter in The Invisible Man, or as a murderous gravedigger in The Bride of Frankenstein. There were many roles in B movies where he was able to go against typecasting, but money was tight and the artistic future he hoped for never materialized. In the mid-1930s, Frye went back to touring with lower-end stage shows—surprising one reviewer with his versatility, per Dwight Frye’s Last Laugh:

A new Dwight Frye is to be found in ‘The Play’s the Thing’. He has the normal use of all his limbs. He talks, smiles and laughs quite amicably. He makes love, he even composes music … And, if there is any truth in the rumors that will leak out of rehearsal rooms, he can he as pleasant, delicate and charming at one end of the line as he can be ugly, unpleasant and horrible at the other.

However, the siren song of movies was as strong as ever. Soon it was back to bit parts (often uncredited) in B movies and demeaning roles in films like 1937’s The Shadow, starring a young Rita Hayworth, where he again played a hunchback (who exclaimed, at one point, “I have a hunch!”). Rumor has it that a desperate Frye even appeared in a stag film, playing a voyeur watching a group of nudists playing volleyball.

As his son recalls in Dwight Frye’s Last Laugh, the usually kind Frye became increasingly frustrated, defeated, depressed, and angry. Money was tight; Laura took a job as a salesclerk, while the family moved to cheaper and cheaper housing.

With the onset of World War II, Frye took an overnight job at Douglas Aircraft—to aid the war effort, and because he needed the money. Now without an agent, Frye would spend his days pounding the pavement, winning tiny roles in films for “Poverty Row” studios and bigger ones in exploitation films like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. In 1941, he even appeared at an LA theater reprising his role of Renfield in a stage production of Dracula.

Aged beyond his years, a beaten-down Frye was increasingly suffering from heart problems. But because of his Christian Scientist faith, he refused any treatment. This inaction led to his final, deadly heart attack.

In Frye’s obituary in The New York Times, the paper of record stated that “Mr. Frye … was best known in motion pictures as a character actor who was murdered or mistreated by the ‘monster men’ of horror films.” One could say the same for what Hollywood did to this talented dreamer. In the ultimate irony, the jubilant Frye family had gone to the theater the night of his death to celebrate him being cast as World War I secretary of war Newton D. Baker in the 20^th Century Fox prestige picture Wilson, based on the life of President Woodrow Wilson.

It was one of the many parts Frye would never get to play.