The Bram Stoker/Peter Cushing Alliance

Paper Summary:

This paper explores horror actor Peter Cushing's ancestral ties with Sir Henry Irving, the great English stage actor and Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, in the context of the English stage and Irving's tours of America, from 1881 to 1889. It examines Bram Stoker's work in April of 1912, that used a new medium of artistic expression and brought Stoker his posthumous fame--the motion picture industry which catapulted Stoker's Gothic novel to the darkest realms of cinematic exploitation and created a new cultural icon in the form of a blood-sucking, malevolent human monster known as Count Dracula.

From the Paper:

"While Ellen Terry and Henry Irving enjoyed some days of quiet and peace in the privacy of their drawing-rooms and staterooms, the rest of the (touring) company, the tons of scenery, the hundreds of costumes, the 1,200 wigs, the small-part actors, the supers and Bram Stoker, were sailing to America in a slow boat called The City of Rome." Although this quote from Madeleine Bingham's 1978 biography Henry Irving and the Victorian Theatre seems at first glance rather superficial, two specific points deserve closer examination--first, Henry Irving, the legendary British thespian, the Sir Laurence Olivier of his time, who dominated the English stage for more than thirty years and was the first actor to be knighted 1, and actress Ellen Terry, his longtime leading lady, must have thought of themselves as blue-blood royalty, due to sailing to America from Liverpool in October of 1883 aboard the luxurious steamship Britannic on their first U.S. tour; and second, as the remainder of the company trudged along on that "slow boat" The City of Rome, Irving's business manager, the Dublin-born Bram Stoker, apparently was not considered as deserving of better quarters during the long voyage across the Atlantic to the theatrical citadel of New York City. However, this may have been in Stoker's favor, for it is quite possible while separated from Irving's manic desire for control that Stoker retreated to his conjoined cabin ( No. 100, a few steps from the promenade bar 2 ) and took pen in hand to scribble in a "dogeared notebook (with) hieroglyphical entries in thick, half-obliterated pencil," 3 more notes concerning his ten years of research into the occultic sciences."

More papers on The Bram Stoker/Peter Cushing Alliance:

• Analytical Essay # 141406 : "Literary Analysis: Bram Stoker and "Dracula"
• Essay # 137840 : "A Psychoanalysis of Bram Stoker’s Dracula"
• Book Review # 109985 : "Renfield in Bram Stoker's "Dracula"."

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