James Whale

James Whale made Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, was open about being homosexual in 1930s Hollywood, and drowned himself in his own swimming pool. He came from a working-class family in Dudley, worked as a cobbler's assistant, and learned draughtsmanship at night; he was captured at Flanders in 1917 and discovered theatre in a German prisoner-of-war camp, staging plays for the other officers. He directed Journey's End in London and New York and was brought to Hollywood to film it. Frankenstein in 1931 made Boris Karloff a star and fixed the flat-headed image of the creature in the public mind permanently. Bride of Frankenstein in 1935 is the better film and is openly strange - camp, funny and sympathetic to the monster in a way the studio did not entirely intend. He lived with the producer David Lewis for over twenty years without concealment, which was unusual and which some contemporaries thought cost him work. His career declined after The Road Back was recut under pressure from the German consulate. After a stroke left him with severe pain and confusion he wrote a note saying the future was only illness and drowned himself; the note was suppressed for decades and the death recorded as an accident. Between the two Frankenstein films he made The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man, the second of which is largely a voice and a set of bandages and still works. Carl Laemmle Jr at Universal gave him an unusual freedom, and Whale's position weakened as soon as the Laemmles lost the studio in 1936. He stopped directing in 1941, well before he had to, and spent most of the next fifteen years painting. His life was dramatised in the 1998 film Gods and Monsters, with Ian McKellen as Whale, which won an Academy Award for its screenplay and returned him to general notice.

• Lived: 1889 CE – 1957 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: artist