Dwight Frye

If you don’t know Dwight Frye by name, you’ve probably seen one or two of his performances. He was one of the lesser-known horror actors that helped make the genre Universal’s great success of the 1930s, but he also had a successful Broadway career. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. Today's show
continues our tradition of Halloween Time episodes, where each year

(00:21):
we pick a classic horror actor to talk about. Uh
spoiler alert, though, I feel like it's fair to say
this one goes down a fairly sad path. Uh So,
just if you're not ready for that, maybe save this
one for later. But it is about one of the
lesser known horror actors that really helped make the genre
universal's great and money making success of the nineteen thirties,

(00:44):
and I wanted to give him a little bit more
time in the spotlight because not many people know about him.
We are talking today about Dwight Fry, and if you
don't know his name, I think only people who are
really into old school horror might just know it off hand.
So it's no shame in that game if you don't
know it, but you have probably seen at least one
or two of his performances. Yeah, I did not know

(01:04):
his name off hand when you sent this outline over
to me, but then when I went to look for
artwork for it. I was like, oh yeah, that guy, yes,
which I think is what most people do. So, uh, yeah,
he's he's due for a little more attention. So Dwight
Fry was born on February eighteen at ninety nine and Selena, Kansas.

(01:24):
He was the only child of Charles and Ella Fry.
They were farmers, and the Fries soon moved to Denver, Colorado.
At this point. The family name was spelled f r
Y with no E at the end, and Dwight's mother, Ello,
was a devout Christian scientist, so Dwight followed in her
spiritual beliefs. He remained deeply religious throughout his life, and

(01:45):
Dwight was really artistic. As a child, he played the
piano and he's sang and at the age of nine
he envisioned a future for himself as a concert pianist,
and that really looked for a while like it would
indeed be his path in life. He was lauded by
teachers and audiences who attended his recitals as a genius
at the keys. Uh he really was. I think if

(02:06):
you would ask most people in Denver at the time, yes,
he was going to grow up to be a great,
famous musician, but eventually he also began to give orations,
something else he was quite skilled at. But then, once
he appeared in his high school's production of the stage
play The Honeymoon in June nineteen seventeen, acting became his
one true love as a performer, and by the time

(02:28):
he graduated from West Side High School in Denver, he
knew he was going to become an actor. This really
wasn't a very welcome shift in his interests, at least
in the view of Dwight's parents, because, as we said,
the family were very religious. They were kind of suspicious
of the potential depravity and debauchery that could be involved
in a career in acting. But even more than that,

(02:51):
acting just wasn't a career that had a high success rate,
and the Fries really wanted their son to have a
stable life. So to soothe his parents fears, Dwight took
an administrative position with a business firm in Denver, but
at the same time he also took acting lessons from
Douglas Fairbank's former teacher, Margaret Feelely, and it was not
long before Feeley connected her pupil, Dwight with the manager

(03:13):
of an acting company who offered the aspiring actor a job.
The company was the Denims Stock Company and they operated
in a theater in Denver from nineteen thirteen and nineteen
thirty two. Every week, the troop put on a new play,
and their offerings ranged from religious holiday fair to melodrama
to straight comedy, and really everything in between. They did

(03:34):
ten performances every week and an evening show every night
of the week, with Mattenee's on Wednesday's, Saturdays, and Sundays.
Dwight made his debut at the Denim on June sixteenth,
nineteen eighteen, in a play called The Man from Mexico.
But while this may have seemed like an auspicious start
for an aspiring young actor, things really did not quite

(03:55):
go as Dwight Fry had hoped. He started out only
getting small, minor roles, which was to be expected, but
then he realized that as the company was fully staffed,
he wasn't likely to move into anything juicier, so he
quit and he enrolled in business school at the University
of Colorado. But he told the head of the company
that he would go back to their theater troop if

(04:16):
something better opened up, and something better did open up.
Just two months into his studies in business, one of
the other actors from the Denom left the troop to
fight in World War One. Dwight accepted the offer to
replace him, and when he rejoined the company, he started
using the f R y E spelling of his name,
basically because he thought it looked better in Brent than

(04:37):
the three letter version. Yeah, we don't know much about
the logic of it other than that, like why he
thought four letters in the laste was better than three,
But he did, and that was how his name was
spelled for the rest of his life. Reviews of Dwight's
acting were not exactly a bulliant. Initially, he was described
as forced and as having an unnatural eagerness on stage,

(04:58):
but it was also noted critics as the season went
on that he got better and better throughout it. I
understand this criticism. I feel like that could describe my
acting as a teenager just the same. The man who
had been running the Denim Company, O. D. Woodward, took
the entire theater company to Spokane, Washington, and he brought

(05:19):
Dwight along as the company juvenile. That meant that he
would play all of the young man roles in the
troops plays. This group actually debuted in Spokane just after
the World War One armistice, in the middle of the
flu pandemic, and initially they had to delay their opening
because they were quarantined to make sure that all the
players were, as Woodward promised, in the best of health. Yeah,

(05:41):
during that pandemic, people were encouraged not to be traveling about,
not not to be um, you know, in large crowded places.
So there was concern that these actors had just derived
from another place, and what if they were sick and
we all went to their play and everybody got really
potentially mortally ill. So they had a wait for several
weeks and just hang out in Spokane. But in Spokane,

(06:04):
Dwight was very well received, with one critic writing that
quote his heart and soul are in his work. He
acted in eighteen of the twenty one place that the
troupe put on that season, and even tapped into his
piano playing skills for some of his roles. But the
group actually splintered in the middle of the season due
to disagreements between Woodward and the theater's business manager. After

(06:25):
this run and Spokane Dwight made his way to Chicago
on the way to his ultimate goal of New York
and Broadway. He appeared in one play in Chicago, it
was The Dangerous Age, before he moved on to New York.
Dwight's first work in New York was as a Vaude billion,
So he was touring various theaters on the circuit from
Montreal to Texas and very lighthearted sketches and musical numbers. Yeah,

(06:49):
he kind of felt like, that's fine, I'll pay my
dues before I get a big Broadway gig. I can
do vaudeville for a little while. His first leading role
on the vaudeville circuit was in a play called La
La Lucille, which featured a couple who were in love
but would have to divorce so that the husband could
inherit his fortune. That's because the aunt who was leaving
him this money did not approve of his wife. This

(07:10):
is a musical comedy filled with wacky, mistaken identities and
cockamami schemes, but the start of the run was abysmal.
Dwight had been cast in the role without a lot
of time to repair, and that was true of the
other performers as well. Many of them just didn't know
their lines. One critic even called it ha ha Lucille,
and almost all of the early reviews panned the production.

(07:32):
Things did get better as the tour went on, though,
and it ran for ten weeks. Yeah, there are lots
of stories about how you could actually hear the script
people in the wings saying more of the lines than
the actors on stage, so they were trying to stage
whisper all their lines to them and it was echoing
throughout the theater. But it did get much better. Uh.

(07:54):
Dwight next signed on with the Merkel Harder Repertory Company,
which kept a really grueling tour schedule. The group got
Sundays off from performing, which was not the case with
a lot of touring companies, but they did two shows
a day every other day of the week, so they
were still doing twelve shows a week. But soon in
Mae Dwight took a job with a non touring stock

(08:15):
company in Massachusetts. So we've talked on the show before
about how really demanding the schedules of these kinds of
jobs can be. And in the case of fries Troop,
the Colonial players, they rehearsed in the mornings, a lunch
if they had time to, then went into makeup to
prep for a matinee, followed by the evening show. And
every week they opened a new play. Yeah so, uh,

(08:36):
I know we've talked about this before, but it always
is just a little bit frightening and leaves me in
awe to think about the idea that you're rehearsing a
new play every week as you're adding it to the
place you're performing in the evenings. It's exhausting. Uh. Dwight
was next lured back to Spokane by his former employer Woodward,
and his return was warmly received by theater goers. They

(09:00):
had actually really missed him. I mentioned earlier. He had
been really popular when he was there the first time,
even though at that point a couple of years had
gone by. He was surprised at how warmly the audience
greeted him on his return. While Dwight enjoyed getting to
be the beloved returning actor, he still saw this as
a detour from his ultimate goal of Broadway. But he

(09:21):
also met a woman named Laura may Boulevard stage name
Laura Lee. In his second run in Spokane. Laura and
dwighte were cast as each other's romantic interests, and later
Dwight would comment that they basically got paid to fall
in love and they were very happy to oblige, but
they didn't stay together. They were both hustling to get
their acting careers started, so neither of them felt they

(09:41):
could really be tied down. Yeah, they called it quits
at the end of the season. So before we get
to the next stage of Dewyte's career, we're going to
take a quick break and hear from one of the
sponsors that keeps this show going. After that second run

(10:02):
in Spokane, acting opportunities weren't exactly falling at Dwight Fry's feet,
so he decided to return to Denver briefly to visit
his parents and think things through, and he actually considered
quitting the theater and going back to business in a
surprising move. His parents were like, no, no, this is
your dream, do it, even though they hadn't been super
thrilled about acting initially, and before he could get to

(10:23):
attached to the idea of becoming a businessman, he went
back to Massachusetts and he joined the Colonial Players for
their ninety two summer season, and that proved to be
a very smart decision. One of Dwight's fans in Massachusetts
asked a connection from Broadway to come and see a
Colonial Players show and scout Dwight Fry, and the producer,

(10:43):
Brock Pemberton, was impressed with what he saw, so much
so that he signed Fry to a contract after seeing
him in exactly one play. Dwight finished the summer season
with the Colonial Players and then headed to Broadway to
appear in a play called The Plot Thickens. Dwight made
his Broadway debut on September five, and while the play
itself didn't get good reviews, Dwight did. The Plot Thickens

(11:06):
only ran for fifteen shows, but right after Dwight immediately
started a new play, The Absurdist Six Characters in Search
of an Author. The show had two test stagings, one
in Scarborough and Hudson and one for the incarcerated population
of sings In Correctional Facility. Then it opened on Broadway
on October and Fry got good reviews. The play ran

(11:27):
for a hundred and thirty seven shows, which was way
beyond its planned four a week run. Yeah, that was
not really a common practice to um go to a
prison and run a potential Broadway play as a test audience.
But brock Pemberton was a little bit outside the box
in his thinking. He was like, well, there are no
critics there, so we don't have to worry about that,

(11:48):
and I will see what an audience who actually wants
to be entertained thinks of this play, which is pretty
interesting in terms of like a thought process. Laura Boulevant,
Dwight's girlfriend from Spokane, had also made her way to
New York and she was working as a dancing girl.
Late nineteen twenty two was a great time for Dwight
Fry because his career was taking off. They were back together,

(12:09):
and he was in love. After six Characters in search
of an author, Dwight moved on to a comedy called
Rita Coventry, where he played one of the titular characters,
romantic Interests, who was also a musician. The play opened
at the Bijou Theater on February ninety three, and it
put Fry on the map. Reviews talked about how the
show dragged until Fry showed up, and then it became delightful.

(12:32):
The next morning, Dwight and Laura read the reviews together
over Breakfast, and based on the success of Rita Coventry,
brock Pemberton signed twenty four year old Dwight Fry to
a five year contract. From then, his career continued with
a series of other well received performances. He also returned
as a featured guest to the Colonial Players in Pittsfield, Massachusetts,

(12:53):
in the summer of nineteen twenty three, and he was
the darling of that summer season. He even reprised his
role in read A Coventry with that stock company. The
musical comedy Sitting Pretty debuted on Broadway on April eighth,
nineteen four, and as the start Dwight delighted critics and audiences.
It was during this time that powerful critic Charles A.

(13:14):
Collins lauded Fry as the next John Barrymore. Yeah. At
one point he was actually put on the list of
like the the ten best Stars of Broadway, which was
pretty huge at the time. Uh In the melodrama Puppets,
Dwight played a villain, a white slaver named Frank Mohacks.
This was a departure from the roles that he had
been playing up to that point because he had done

(13:35):
a lot of musicals and a lot of comedy and
light fare, and the critics and audiences adored him in
this villainous role. This was followed by the show A
Man's Man in nineteen five, which is a story about
a married couple who yearns for more in the ways
that their desires are twisted by others for their own designs.
While Dwight Fry had been lauded and praised for his

(13:56):
work up to that point, A Man's Man truly made
him a star there of views were all praise, and
Dwight called it one of his favorite roles. A Man's
Man ran for a hundred and twenties shows, and Dwight's
co star in the play, Josephine Hutchinson, later talked about
how immersed Fry would become in the role, and as
since he was method acting before that was a common
technique of actors. She once told writer Gregory William mank

(14:19):
quote Dwight would come into the theater and so hypnotize
himself into his role every night that I was afraid
he'd kill me. Yeah, he was. He was an immersion
actor all the way, beginning at the end of ninety
six and running well into Dwight was in a comedy play,
the title of which utterly charms me. It was The

(14:40):
Devil in the Cheese. This play a plot as nutty
as one might expect, with an Egyptian god appearing to
grant one of the characters a wish after that man
eats a piece of mummified two thousand year old cheese.
I feel like this is a cautionary tale about our
unearthed episode. In the cast, along with Dwight, Fry, was

(15:02):
also a foreign born actor whose career would end up
tied to Dwight's down the road, and that was Baila Lugosi.
Both Lugosi and Fry got the best reviews of the cast,
but they didn't become friends. After The Devil and the
Cheese ended its successful run, Lugosi went on to start
in the Broadway production of Dracula, and Dwight Fry went
on to a whole string of jobs, some successful and

(15:22):
some not, but he was consistently reviewed positively. Yeah, he
was one of those actors that even if the play
was a clunker, they would always go. But Dwight Fry
was great, Like he was kind of the saving grace
of a lot of shows in Dwight had great success
in Mima, this time as another villain, a very cruel
pimp with the nickname Alphonse the Spider. And the reviews

(15:43):
of that play, which was set in Hell and had
a constant swirl of rumors about how the entire cast
nearly had nervous breakdowns from the way that the rehearsals
had been run. We're Not Good I was not well
reviewed at all, but the dark nature of the material
and the spectacle of the production, it was one of
those shows where the sets were really lavish and expensive,
continued to draw audiences. It made a ton of money

(16:05):
and was a huge success, and it ran for a
hundred and eighty shows. On August first night, Dwight and
Laura got married, they honeymooned in Bermuda. Her career was
also really blossoming, and during the run of Mima, she
was in rehearsals and opening a Broadway show called Congratulations
that opened in April nine and it ran for thirty
nine shows. After a very successful in NY nine season

(16:30):
for dwightt in New York, he opted to once again
returned to the Colonial Players in July of nineteen twenty
nine for another guest engagement there, and at the end
of nineteen twenty nine, Dwight's Broadway career was undeniably successful,
but as the Wall Street Crash through New York into
a tailspin because a lot of the people that were
paying for Broadway tickets were suddenly without money, Hollywood beckoned

(16:52):
to a lot of theater actors. Dwight and Laura moved
to Los Angeles, and Dwight started acting in l a plays,
starting with Ropes And which was based on a nine
murder case. And just as he had in New York,
Fry received praise for his work and soon was making
a name for himself as a character actor. He also
appeared in a revival of A Man's Man. All that

(17:13):
positive critical attention that he was getting on stage paid
off when Dwight started getting his first film roles. He
first played a gangster in The Doorway to Hell in
nineteen thirty, followed by a larger role in Man to
Man later that same year. As nineteen thirty came to
an end, dwight fries life had two big events unfolding. One,

(17:33):
he and Laura were expecting a child, and two he
was cast as Renfield in Universal's Dracula. Draculus started shooting
on September twenty ninety, and, just as with any other role,
Dwight really threw himself into it and the Bram Stoker novel,
the stage play and film were adapted from. Renfield is

(17:54):
described in the fictional Journal of Dr Seward in the
following way quote sanguine temperament, rate, physical strength, morbidly excitable,
periods of gloom ending in some fixed idea which I
cannot make out. And Fry's portrayal of Renfield is a
roller coaster of madness, from these really quiet and heartbreaking
weeping moments to wide eyed delirium driven by being in

(18:17):
this role of Lugosi's very seductive vampire. Fry in this
part always reminds me of kind of a clenched jaw,
and I've always described it that way, and then I
was rewatching it prepping for this, and I realized it's
because he has this posture where he leans slightly forward
from his upper body and he is sort of like
clenching his jawn, pushing it forward. But he does that

(18:38):
physicality in such a way that that's just how the
whole role feels to me Laura traveled back to Spokane,
Washington to give birth, while Dwight stayed in Hollywood for
any reshoots that would be required at the end of
Dracula's production. Their son, Dwight David Fry, was born the
day after Christmas, December. Laura and the baby stayed in
Spokane for six weeks before heading back to Los Angeles

(19:00):
so that Dwight could meet his new son, who they
nicknamed Buddy. Yeah, she had been in Spokane because her
family was there, and because of shooting. She knew Dwight
would not necessarily be able to help her out a
lot and wait on her as she might need in
her recovery, So that's why she was in Spokane's for
so long. And we're going to talk about the release
of Dracula and the films that Fry worked on after

(19:21):
it in just a moment, But first we're gonna pause
for a little sponsor break. When Dracula was wide released
on Valentine's Day of it was an instant hit. It
sold out show after show across the country, and it
made Baila Legosi a star. And for Dwight Fry, it

(19:45):
got the attention of casting directors. He was cast in
supporting roles after it in The Black Camel and The
Maltese Falcon. Immediately following Dracula's opening success, then there was Frankenstein. Initially,
there was something of a false start. Dwight was called
in for a test by writer director Robert Floury Legosi

(20:05):
was in the same test as Dr Frankenstein's monster. Fry
was auditioning for the role of Fritz, who was a
hunchback dwarf who didn't appear in the original novel but
was added for the stage adaptation. Yeah, and then he
was included when that stage adaptation was adapted for film.
Flory's test for Frankenstein is something of a controversy in

(20:25):
film history. Floory always claimed that the test went great,
but stories have persisted that in fact, it was a
big problem. It was unintentionally comedic, and Lugosi was super
angry about the whole thing and felt that the role,
at least as it was written for that test sequence,
was beneath him, and so the movie fell through for
a variety of reasons. Dwight, in the meantime, had to

(20:46):
mortgage his car to make ends meet. But then former
podcast subject James Whale decided to take on Frankenstein. He
reworked the project, cast Boris Karloff as the monster, and
started shooting in August one. Fry remained in the role
of Fritz, stealing a brain for Dr Frankenstein's project and
then later taunting the monster mercilessly. As he had done

(21:09):
on previous roles. Dwight would not drop out of character
once he was in makeup, so he often frightened the
cast and crew just by sort of lurking around the set. UH.
This was in contrast to Boris Karlov, who if you
look around online for very long, you will find pictures
of this. But he took tea and he smoked, and
he played with animals in between takes, all in that

(21:30):
full monster makeup UH, and filming wrapped on October three,
November twenty the film premiere through a series of soft
openings before moving to the larger New York and l
A markets, and that was done because Universal was actually
concerned that it might be too frightening, and they wanted
to see how it played in small release first. They
didn't need to worry, though. Frankenstein was an even bigger

(21:53):
hit than Dracula had been. But at this point, audiences
who had never seen Dwight Fry a year earlier had
now seen him in two horror films, both times playing
mad men back to back. He might have been able
to do it all on stage for musical theater to
serious drama, but some movie goers he was only the
sort of creepy madman henchman type person. Yeah, kind of

(22:14):
bit him on the tail. Being as good as he was,
Dwight had mounting pressure as a provider at home. His
father had died and his mother moved to California to
live with his family in the Hollywood Hills. And he
did get work. He had a series of bit parts
in medium success films, but he was already suffering from typecasting.
In Threes The Vampire Bat he played a simpleton named

(22:38):
Herman who kept bats as pets. Uh and Herman is
wrongfully scapegoaded in the plot for a series of murders.
It's very charming. I really love them The Vampire Bat
Um And there is one of the best um shock
takes in that movie ever by one of the actresses
in a scene with Dwight Fry, in my opinion, and

(23:00):
it is a parent from this movie that already Hollywood
saw this multi talented and musically skilled actor, Dwight Fry
in just the one way. He really missed getting to
play different characters, so he started stage acting again. He
started living something of a by Coast of life, traveling
back and forth from l A to New York, touring
plays and still working in film, although his film roles

(23:22):
continued to generally be these creepy, weirdo characters. In a way,
he was living two lives in the early nineteen thirties
in l A. He had a typecast movie career, and
then back on Broadway and in tours of the East Coast.
He continued to impress theater goers with his range, but
somehow he could never get these two worlds to intersect. Yeah,

(23:42):
it's so strange because he was so talented in so
many ways, and it really come up doing comedy. So
to then only get the one type of role over
and over and over in Hollywood was really frustrating. But
then he got offered a role as a good guy.
It was still in a horror movie that's still fresh.
Genre was all the rage at the time, and it

(24:02):
was called The Crime of Dr Crespy. Along with Eric
von Stroheim, although after the picture was finished, it kind
of lingered for a while without a release date until
it was finally put out in In the meantime, James
Whale made his second Frankenstein movie, which eventually became the
Bride of Frankenstein, and he conjured apart for Dwight by
cobbling together three smaller roles. Dwight had really loved working

(24:27):
with James Whale, so he was really happy to do
another horror film with him as the character of Carl,
for I got a chance to be comedic and scary
and to have a really fabulous death scene. Whale's second
Frankenstein movie was a huge success. Yeah. In interviews with
Dwight Fry's son, his son will often talk about how
he really credits James Whale was sort of saving them

(24:49):
at a time when they were really desperate and he
really needed acting work. And then he got cast, of
course in Frankenstein. So yeah, he really thought the world
of James Whale. Dwight's options on Broadway uh started to dwindle,
so he started spending more time in Hollywood playing these
bit parts and often wondering how actors who had stood
in his shadow on the New York Stage had more

(25:11):
successful careers when they moved out to California than he did.
We talked in our James Wale episodes about the nineteen
thirty seven film The Road Back, which was heavily edited
to avoid losing the German market because of its anti
Nazi message. Dwight Fry had a bit part in this film,
and just as Wales's film was cut down, so was
Dwight's career. But it wasn't because of his involvement in

(25:33):
this movie. He had just never really caught on as
a screen actor that would be billed as a major player.
Fry played an unsettling character on the l A Stage
in eight in a play called Night Must Fall. His
former director from Spokane, Washington, Odie Woodward, directed him in
the part of a man who carried a woman's head
around in a box, and that play ran at l

(25:56):
A's Mason Opera House in May of that year. In
the summer of nine, team thirty eight, the Regina Movie
Theater in Los Angeles was really struggling. The sixt venue
wasn't selling tickets, and in a desperate move, the manager
e Mark Human booked a horror triple bill as kind
of a stunt in the late summer. So starting in
August of that year, they started showing Son of Kong, Dracula,

(26:18):
and Frankenstein on one ticket. For some reason, this became
one of the most popular tickets in Los Angeles, with
lines around the block in the theater, running the bill
at all hours and still selling out and turning away customers.
I have a side theory about why this was so successful,
and it harkens back to our air conditioning episode. So

(26:39):
if you could pay for one ticket and get like
five hours of air conditioning, wouldn't you do it? Sure
would for movies that had been really popular already, so
there was I mean a little bit of nostalgia. It
was only like eight years for some of them, but
I think that might have contributed to why that was
so successful again August in Los Angeles. So this event

(27:00):
really reinvigorated the careers of Lugosi and Karlov and Dwight
Fry was hoping for a similar lift. He actually took
his son to one of these shows, and he was
a little bit disappointed that Buddy enjoyed himself, but was
not the least bit scared. He was kind of hoping
that Renfield would inspire just a little bit of terror,
and instead his son just thought it was amazing and fun.
Dwight was cast in Son of Frankenstein, which was funded

(27:23):
in the hopes of cashing in on the new wave
of interest in these older universal horror pictures, but by
the time the film was edited, Fry's small part was
completely removed from it. In one Dracula was staged in
Los Angeles at the Bow Arts Theater, and for that
stage production for I reprised his role of Renfield. He

(27:43):
also continued to take bit parts in films, and he
actually appears in a short film called Don't Talk, which
was made in two and was nominated for an Oscar
that year. But that was like a small bright light
in a dimming career. He needed to make ends meet,
so he took a job at the Douglas Eric Draft
Factory and worked there as a tool designer at night.

(28:03):
During the day, he continued to look for acting jobs.
A really good acting opportunity came along when he was
offered the role of Alexander Hamilton's in the Broadway play
The Patriots, but he turned it down. He wasn't willing
to leave the family or leave his job at Douglas
during wartime. It was a really difficult decision though. Yeah,
it's described by his son is like a very heartbreaking

(28:25):
decision for him to make. Uh. And Dwight's last horror
picture was Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman. It was made in
nineteen three, and that was followed the same year by
two uncredited performances in Hangman Also Die and Dangerous Blonds.
His wife Laura picked up work as a store clerk
to keep the family afloat. Finally, in late nineteen forty three,

(28:46):
there was a ray of light. Fry was cast in
a Woodrow Wilson biopic that was called Wilson. This was
it twentieth Century Fox. He had the smallest role of
Wilson's Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker. But Fox was
putting a lot of money into this movie. It was
going to be their big offering of and it would
be Fry's first color picture. Yeah, he was pretty excited

(29:09):
that this was gonna kind of relaunch his career. And
on the night of November seven, Dwight took his wife
Laura and their son Buddy to the Pantageous Theater to
watch an r KO double bill of a Lady Takes
a Chance and Sherlock Holmes Faces Death. Sets in that
Sherlock Holmes picture were actually from films that Fry had
been in. There was a set in it from Dracula

(29:30):
and another from Frankenstein. When the evening's entertainment was over,
the family walked to a bus stop at Hollywood and Vine.
They boarded the bus back home, but just after they
got on, d White collapsed in the aisle. An ambulance
was called. He was taken to Hollywood Receiving Hospital, where
he died shortly after arrival. He was forty four and

(29:52):
had been really hopeful that his acting career was once
again about to get underway, but he had died of
a heart attack. His death certificate was that his profession
as tool designer in reference to this work he was
doing in the aircraft industry. And while Dwight's death was
a surprise to virtually everyone, he had actually known for
a while that he had a heart condition. He had

(30:13):
had two minor heart attacks at work at the factory,
and he never told his family about them, and he
swore his coworkers to secrecy because he believed that he
would be healed through faith, so he never sought any
medical attention. He was buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale.
So it's a very sad end for Dwight Fry because
he was very young, and I feel like he probably

(30:34):
could have done a lot more interesting work. Uh. And
like I said, I really enjoy him in a lot
of movies, so I'm bummed that we don't have more
of them. Uh. He It's kind of interesting. He had
never in his life gotten fan mail, and it wasn't
until after he died that his family started receiving fan
mail for his work, so he kind of got recognized
after he had passed, but not during his lifetime. Dwight

(30:59):
for I, I'm sorry that was a bummer Halloween story.
Well it's also one of those which it doesn't seem
like it's going to be a bummer and then it
suddenly is right because it seems like, I mean right
at the end, it really seemed like it was about
to turn around. Sorry, do you have some listener mail

(31:21):
for us? That's maybe not a bummer? I do. It's
it's more of a thank you than a listener mail completely. Uh,
there is mail involved, but I'm not going to read
it all. It is in tiny script, and I'm not
confident that I will read it all correctly, but it
is from our listener Jin. And Jin made a trip
to the Melton Carnegie Museum and she very very kindly

(31:42):
sent us a bunch of goodies. So we have um
Melton Carnegie Museum bookmarks and pencils and pens and these
cute little pocket note pads and even pencil sharpeners. And
I'm telling you, the weight of my heart is through
school supplies. So this is heaven. So thank you, thank you,
thank you so much. Jan. It was an amazing little

(32:02):
parcel to open. Uh, and I really really enjoyed it,
and I was glad that she kind of had this
connection to history UH and Andrew Carnegie's history through our podcast.
So I thank you very very much. If you would
like to write to us, you can do so at
History Podcast at houst works dot com. You can also
find us pretty much everywhere on social media as Missed
in History and Missed in History dot com is where

(32:24):
you can find show notes for any of the episodes
that Tracy and I have worked on, as well as
a full back catalog archive of every episode of the
show that has ever existed, so we welcome you to
come and hang out with us at missed in History
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(32:46):
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