Bela Lugosi was buried in his full Dracula cape, but it was never his dying wish; his family simply assumed it was what he would have wanted. This episode uses that blurred line between man and monster to explore the life of a classically trained Hungarian actor who dropped out of school at 12, performed Shakespeare at the National Theatre of Hungary, served as an infantry lieutenant on the Russian front in World War One, and was driven into exile after organizing an actors’ union during the Hungarian Soviet Republic.

The conversation follows his arrival at Ellis Island in 1921 speaking almost no English, the Hungarian stock company that kept him working, the 1927 Broadway hit Dracula, and Universal’s reluctance to cast him in the 1931 film until he accepted just 3,500 dollars for seven weeks of work. It then traces the typecasting that followed, the second billing under Boris Karloff, war-injury sciatica treated with morphine and methadone, the descent into poverty row and live spook shows, the Ed Wood years, and the 1979 California Supreme Court case Lugosi v. Universal that helped spur the state’s Celebrities Rights Act.

• The 1937 paid advertisement in a casting directory begging directors not to pigeonhole him in horror
• How he stole Son of Frankenstein as Ygor while buried under grotesque makeup
• The Milton Berle live-television sketch that exposed his vulnerability to ad-libbing
• Frank Sinatra’s unexpected 1,000 dollar check during his hospital treatment for addiction
• Bauhaus, Martin Landau’s Oscar for Ed Wood, and the cape acquired by the Academy Museum in 2019