Movie
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons Photo shows actor Vincent Price (1962)
Professor Henry Jarrod
The wax sculptor with a terrible secret — Vincent Price's elegant pencil mustache, the lip that launched a horror career.
- Actor
- Vincent Price
- Film
- House of Wax
- Year
- 1953
- Medium
- Movie
- Style
- Pencil
- Fan Votes
- 0 legendary · 0 meh
Why Professor Henry Jarrod's Mustache Matters
House of Wax (1953) was the film that turned Vincent Price from a respected character actor into the gentleman of horror. He plays Professor Henry Jarrod, a gifted wax sculptor whose museum is burned for the insurance money and who returns, scarred and vengeful, to open a new House of Wax with figures that are a little too lifelike.
Price wears his trademark pencil mustache, thin and precise, and it is essential to the performance. Jarrod is refined, soft-spoken, and courteous — the mustache signals taste and restraint, which makes the monster underneath all the more unsettling.
The film was the first major studio release in 3-D and a box-office hit, and Price's mustache went on to anchor The Fly (1958), House on Haunted Hill (1959), and decades of velvet-voiced villainy.
- *House of Wax* (1953) was the first color 3-D feature from a major American studio.
- The film was a remake of *Mystery of the Wax Museum* (1933).
- Vincent Price (1911–1993) was an avid art collector and gourmet cook who published several cookbooks.
How to Grow the Pencil
Thin, sharp, and dangerous. The mustache of leading men, jazz cats, and people who own tuxedos.
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