Boris Karloff

What grips me about Boris Karloff is the patience. He was 44 and roughly 80 films deep before Frankenstein's monster made him an icon overnight, and that long apprenticeship shows in the work. Behind the bolts and greasepaint he gave the creature something most horror never bothers with: genuine pathos, a wounded soul you actually mourn. I think of him less as the King of Horror and more as a stage-trained craftsman who happened to find immortality in a monster. That blend of menace and tenderness is rarer than the genre lets on, and it's why his shadow still falls over the screen.

Name (English)

Boris Karloff

Name (Japanese)

ボリス・カーロフ

Reading

ぼりす・かーろふ

Born

November 23, 1887 – February 2, 1969

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Sagittarius / Boar

Origin

Dulwich, United Kingdom

Height

180 cm

Occupation

film actor / stage actor / actor

University

King's College London

Awards & achievements

• star on Hollywood Walk of Fame

• Official sitehttps://www.karloff.com
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris%20Karloff
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%9C%E3%83%AA%E3%82%B9%E3%83%BB%E3%82%AB%E3%83%BC%E3%83%AD%E3%83%95
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q203219

Tags

• film actor
• stage actor
• actor

Last updated

2026-06-16

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.