Bela Lugosi signed montage framed

On offer is this stunning montage of the late Bela Lugosi. Includes a vintage signature and 2 10x8 inch B&W photographs. This montage has then been double matted and includes a black slip and plaque. The frame is a beautiful black gallery quality moulding.

Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó (20 October 1882 – 16 August 1956) commonly known as Béla Lugosi, was a Hungarian actor of stage and screen. He was best known for playing Count Dracula in the Broadway play and subsequent film version. In the last years of his career he was featured in several of Ed Wood's low budget films.

DRACULA

Lugosi was approached in the summer of 1927 to star in a Broadway production of Dracula adapted by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston from Bram Stoker's novel. The Horace Liveright production was successful, running 261 performances before touring. He was soon called to Hollywood for character parts in early talkies. In 1929, Lugosi took his place in Hollywood society and scandal when he married wealthy San Francisco widow Beatrice Weeks, but she filed for divorce four months later. Weeks cited actress Clara Bow as the "other woman". Despite his critically acclaimed performance on stage, Lugosi was not the Universal Pictures first choice for the role of Dracula when the company optioned the rights to the Deane play and began production in 1930. A persistent rumor asserts that director Tod Browning's long-time collaborator Lon Chaney was Universal's first choice for the role, and that Lugosi was chosen only due to Chaney's death shortly before production. This is questionable, because Chaney had been under long-term contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer since 1925, and had negotiated a lucrative new contract just before his death. Chaney and Browning had worked together on several projects (including four of Chaney's final five releases), but Browning was only a last-minute choice to direct the movie version of Dracula after the death of director Paul Leni, who was originally slated to direct. In 1933 he married 19-year-old Lillian Arch, the daughter of Hungarian immigrants. They had a child, Bela G. Lugosi, in 1938. Lillian and Béla divorced in 1953, at least partially because of Béla's jealousy over Lillian taking a full-time job as an assistant to Brian Donlevy on the sets and studios for Donlevy's radio and television series "Dangerous Assignment" — Lillian eventually did marry Brian Donlevy, in 1966. Lugosi married Hope Lininger in 1953. She had been a fan of his, writing letters to him when he was in hospital recovering from addiction to Demerol. She would sign her letters 'A dash of Hope'.

Lugosi died of a heart attack on August 16, 1956 while lying on a couch in his Los Angeles home. He was 73. The rumor that Lugosi was clutching the script for The Final Curtain, a planned Ed Wood project, at the time of his death is not true. Lugosi was buried wearing one of the Dracula stage play costumes, per the request of his son and fourth wife, in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Contrary to popular belief, Lugosi never requested to be buried in his cloak; Bela G. Lugosi confirmed on numerous occasions that he and his mother, Lillian, actually made the decision but believed that it is what his father would have wanted.