With this definitive biography of her iconic father, Price gives his fans a candid, intimate portrait of a 20th-century Renaissance man. She begins by tracing the family history back to 1832 to provide insight into her father's upbringing in a cultured family surrounded by art, music, and theater. Though her father is best known as the gentleman of the classic American horror film, Price writes extensively of his distinguished career on both the London and Broadway stages, his inventive gourmet cooking and sense of design, and his second career as an art collector. Price covers all of her father's films, from the noir classic Laura to House of Wax, the Edgar Allan Poe film series and his last work, Edward Scissorhands, revealing Hollywood society while describing each production as well as audience or critical reaction to it. She also sensitively describes his family life, marriages, political affiliations, and friendships in this fascinating portrait. Recommended for academic libraries with film studies or popular culture collections and public libraries.ÄLisa N. Johnston, Sweet Briar Coll. Lib., VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A legendary screen villain and host of PBS's Mystery, Vincent Price (1911- 1993) was also a gourmet chef, a bestselling author, an enthusiastic art expert and collector and a general all-around good guy, according to this vivid biography. Written by his daughter Victoria, who writes for television, the book takes us from Price's early acting career, where one of his first jobs was as Helen Hayes's leading man on Broadway, to his days, starting in 1938, under a Hollywood contract, beginning with supporting film roles (Laura; Song of Bernadette). By the 1950s, he had patented his suavely villainous screen persona in The Fly, House of Wax and The Ten Commandments. By the time Victoria was born to Price and his second wife, Mary, in 1962, he was enjoying his greatest success in film, his low-budget but highly profitable collaborations with Roger Corman (The Pit & the Pendulum, Masque of Red Death). Victoria Price explores her father's life as if unraveling a mystery, never ignoring his failings (his secret signing of a loyalty oath during the blacklisting era; an affair that destroyed his 24-year marriage) or secrets (including his possible bisexuality). Definitive, exhaustively researched and superbly written, the book contains none of the sentimentality the subtitle may suggestÄin part because of the vast material the author had access to, including over 200 pages of transcribed conversations during her father's final years, two nearly completed memoirs by him, a lifetime of preserved correspondence and the firsthand recollections of dozens of contemporaries. Victoria Price tells Vincent's tale with such clear-eyed pride that the reader cannot help being won over. Photos not seen by PW. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Vincent Price is best remembered as the redeeming quality of a run of 1950s and 1960s horror films, but daughter Victoria says that "fewer than a third of the more than one hundred pictures he made . . . were horror movies." In a literate biography, she examines her father's career and personal life, attending to the story behind the story. As a young man, Price at first seemed enamored of the Nazi regime in Germany, though he later turned staunchly antifascist. A less sympathetic biographer might charge that Price was in the rumored clique of Nazi spies and sympathizers in Hollywood, but Victoria reminds readers of how her father's politics later put him at odds with the loyalty-oath louts of the blacklist days. Price, previously a character actor, launched his career as a horror leading man in House of Wax (1953) and thereafter starred in gimmicky shockers by "quirky but brilliant" William Castle and horror comedies by B-movie king Roger Corman. This is an excellent, detailed, readable biography of the "Gable of Gothic." --Mike Tribby

Although she gives a thoughtful and detailed recounting of Vincent Price's career, his daughter sticks too closely to the facts to make this biography anything special'a disappointment, considering the potential. Victoria Price, a television screenwriter, was born when her father was already 50, so that might account for some of the distance from her subject matter. But, then, where is the yearning for the absent father? The daughter is dispassionate to a fault. She starts off with the history of her family, which is standard enough. Yet she doesn't add any family stories or personal remembrances that would soften the narrative, even when she gets to material about which she would have firsthand knowledge. Instead, she gives a straightforward, almost day-to-day account of her father's whereabouts. He grew up, visited Europe, went to Yale, started acting in England, and so on. When Price gets to Broadway in the 1930s and to Hollywood at the end of that decade, his personal life, by this account, is over. For the next 50 years, from Service De Luxe in 1938, when he was 27, to Edward Scissorhands in 1990, three years before his death, his daughter merely recounts him going from set to set for over 100 films. Even when Victoria gets to her own time with her father, she doesn't get to her emotions. ``I hardly remember seeing my father during this time at all,'' she writes about her preteen years, when her father and mother divorced. Instead of delving into what it was about her father that led him him to work so much and spend so little time with his children, she goes back to reciting his whereabouts. Price married three times, had a son and a daughter 22 years apart, collected art, and was investigated by the government during the 1950s for suspected communist activities. These are the things readers want to know about in detail, not the run-down on the cast of Laura. (32 pages b&w photos)