In 1955 Bela Lugosi was in a sad state. The once-hand­some, Hun­gar­i­an-born star of Drac­u­la had seen his career degen­er­ate over the pre­vi­ous two decades until at last he was reduced to play­ing a cru­el par­o­dy of him­self in some of the tack­i­est B hor­ror films ever made. Along the way he picked up a drug habit. In late April of 1955 the 72-year-old actor, des­ti­tute and recent­ly divorced from his fourth wife, checked him­self into the psy­cho­path­ic ward at Los Ange­les Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal. A few days lat­er, in a hear­ing held at the ward, Lugosi plead­ed with a judge to com­mit him to a state hos­pi­tal. A Unit­ed Press arti­cle from April 23, 1955 describes the scene:

Although weigh­ing only 125 pounds and only a shad­ow of his for­mer self, Lugosi’s voice was clear and res­o­nant as he told the court how shoot­ing pains in his legs led him to start tak­ing mor­phine injec­tions in 1935. With­out mor­phine, he could­n’t work, Lugosi said.

“I start­ed using it under a doc­tor’s care,” he said. “I knew after a time it was get­ting out of con­trol.”

“Sev­en­teen years ago, on a trip to Eng­land, I heard of Metho­d­one, a new drug. I brought a big box of it back home. I guess I brought a pound,” Lugosi said.

“Ever since I’ve used that, or demerol. I just took the drugs. I did­n’t eat. I got sick­er and sick­er.”

The judge com­mend­ed Lugosi for tak­ing action to fight his addic­tion, and com­mit­ted him to the Met­ro­pol­i­tan State Hos­pi­tal in Nor­walk, a sub­urb of Los Ange­les, for a min­i­mum of three months and a max­i­mum of two years. Dur­ing his time in the hos­pi­tal, the old man plot­ted his come­back. In The Immor­tal Count: The Life and Films of Bela Lugosi, Arthur Lennig writes:

While at the hos­pi­tal, Lugosi had been giv­en the script of his next Ed Wood pic­ture, The Ghoul Goes West, a strange con­coc­tion in which a mad doc­tor goes out west to car­ry out his scheme to make super-crea­tures out of cow­boys and rule the world. The actor looked for­ward to this forth­com­ing pro­duc­tion, which he believed would begin about ten days after leav­ing the hos­pi­tal, and bran­dished the script as proof that he would start work. “It’s very cute,” he said to the reporters. It prob­a­bly was­n’t, but Lugosi no doubt believed that all the front page pub­lic­i­ty, how­ev­er noto­ri­ous, would aid in his come­back, a come­back that would even­tu­al­ly raise him above the low­ly ranks of Ed Wood’s shoe­string pro­duc­tions. Bela posed for a pho­to­graph with the script in one hand while his oth­er hand was dra­mat­i­cal­ly raised in an assertive fist.

The inter­view above was filmed on August 4, 1955, one day before the actor’s release from the hos­pi­tal. In the clip, Lugosi smiles and declares him­self “a new man.” Less than three weeks lat­er he mar­ried his fifth wife, an obsessed fan who report­ed­ly sent him a let­ter every day he was in the hos­pi­tal. The Ghoul Goes West nev­er mate­ri­al­ized, but Lugosi col­lab­o­rat­ed with Ed Wood on a cou­ple of oth­er projects, includ­ing a movie that some crit­ics would even­tu­al­ly call “the worst film ever made,” Plan 9 From Out­er Space. As his hope of a gen­uine come­back crum­bled, Lugosi drank heav­i­ly. On August 16, 1956–barely over a year after his release from Met­ro­pol­i­tan State Hospital–Lugosi died of a heart attack. He was buried in his Drac­u­la cos­tume.

Sev­er­al Lugosi films appear on our big list of Free Movies Online.