The man who spent his later years dressed as Father Christmas handing gifts to disabled children, won a Grammy for a beloved holiday classic and loved guacamole above all other foods was also the actor who defined the cinematic image of a stitched-together corpse. This deep dive examines the unlikely career of William Henry Pratt, born in London in 1887 into a family of British diplomats and Indian Civil Service officials. Of Anglo-Indian heritage, bow-legged, with a childhood stutter and a lifelong lisp, he dropped out of King’s College in 1909, sailed to Canada, and dug ditches and laid railroad track to fund his nights in obscure touring theater troupes, permanently damaging his back in the process.

The episode covers his adoption of the name Boris Karloff around 1912 to spare his brothers embarrassment, his typecasting in exotic villain roles in silent Hollywood, the rainy bus-stop ride from Lon Chaney Sr. that changed his approach, and his 82nd film, Frankenstein in 1931, where 11-pound boots on a compromised spine produced the monster’s lurching walk. It follows his pivot when the Hays Code suppressed horror: Broadway’s Arsenic and Old Lace, radio anthologies, spoken word albums, and his Grammy-winning narration of How the Grinch Stole Christmas in 1966, along with his final films shot with half a functioning lung, an oxygen tank and a wheelchair.

• Why a diplomat’s son chose manual labor in Saskatchewan and British Columbia over a consular career
• The manufactured press rivalry between Karloff and Bela Lugosi and the reality of their professional partnership
• How the studio came to bill him simply as Karloff and copyright the monster makeup
• The Grinch trivia: Karloff narrated, but Thurl Ravenscroft sang the famous song
• His work as a charter member of the Screen Actors Guild fighting for rest periods and better conditions