Boo to you

William Pratt wanted out of England back in 1909, so flipped a coin to decide whether to grab a boat to Australia, or to Canukistan. Heads it was, and he ended up in Montreal, only to criss-cross the country working a series of miserable jobs. ("[My boss] would get me out of bed with a pitchfork at four in the morning to go catch horses in the fields and bring them in," recalled Pratt to a biographer.)

Pratt finally ended up as an actor, and needed a snazzier, "exotic" name in order to get attention. With his new moniker, he ended up playing "dark, accented villains," it sez here in the October/November issue of The Beaver magazine (sadly, it's about Canadian history, not girly naughty bits -- when oh when will someone bankroll my new T&A glossy?). "His brooding, foreign-seeming looks ended up being useful for playing East Indians, Middle Easterners, even Chinese."

Pratt's new name? Boris Karloff. He played Frankenstein when he was 43.

Based on the 1817 story by Mary Wollstoncraft Shelley, Frankie was, of course, an allegory: "[Shelley] fell into a reverie of waking dream where she saw 'the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.' She felt the terror for the artist who endeavored 'to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world' by giving the 'spark of life' to a 'hideous corpse.' [...]

"To those who have not read the book, the name Frankenstein is often associated with the monster rather than its creator. The mistake is perhaps not altogether erroneous, for as many critics point out the creature and his maker are doubles of one another, or doppelgangers. Their relationship is similar to that between the head and the heart, or the intellect and the emotion.

"The conception of the divided self -- the idea that the civilized man or woman contains within a monstrous, destructive force -- emerges as the creature echoes both Frankenstein's and narrator Robert Walton's loneliness: all three wish for a friend or companion. Frankenstein and his monster alternately pursue and flee from one another. Like fragments of a mind in conflict with itself, they represent polar opposites which are not reconciled, and which destroy each other at the end. For example, the creature enacts the repressed desires of its maker, alleviating Victor Frankenstein's fear of sexuality by murdering his bride, Elizabeth Lavenza, on their wedding night."

Avoidance of humping someone of the opposite sex. Remind you of anyone?