[Lord Summerisle]

Like I said in my initial post, I know there'll be a load of Price fans out there who disagree with me on this one, and I had - have - absolutely no intention of upsetting them. We all have our own personal favourite actors, films etc (although hopefully all of us here include Mr. Lee among them :) )

The question is whether you consider Price to be a "great" actor, and that of course is a pretty subjective judgement. After all, who's to say what "great" is?

I think there are certain actors who everybody would acknowledge as being unequivocally "great". These are guys with an enormous range, who can play Shakespeare or a drunk or a gangster with equal aplomb; real craftsmen (and women, although there don't seem to be so many) who truly inhabit the characters they play, bring them to life in a full and rounded way. We're talking Laurence Olivier, Spencer Tracy, Charles Laughton; or if you want moderns, Robert De Niro for example.

Then there are a whole bunch of actors who are fantastic, truly "great" to their fans, and to fans of their films, and whom some objective critics might also call great. I would include in this category actors such as Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Stewart, Peter Sellers, Sterling Hayden, Robert Ryan, Bette Davis, Boris Karloff, Richard Burton, Meryl Streep, loads of others, and - if I'm honest - Peter Cushing. Peter Cushing is one of my very favourite actors of all time, an absolute hero of mine, but if you polled fifty critics I bet not one would put him in their all-time top ten, the reason being that his fame rests primarily on his performances in horror films, and horror films have never achieved the recognition of so-called "serious" drama. (It's the same with comedy. Comic actors never get the acclaim accorded to serious actors. I love Laurel and Hardy, love them, but nobody ever talks about them as being all-time great actors.)

Then you've got a third category, actors who are good - sometimes very good - and have fanatical followings, but probably wouldn't be classed as "great" by the majority of critics (although what do the critics know?!:) ) I myself would put Vincent Price into this category. Also my own favourite movie "star", Steve McQueen. McQueen was a much better actor than people give him credit for, but he wasn't great; his range was too limited. But he was certainly the king of cool.

Lastly you've got the "stars", men and women whose acting ability is questionable at best, but who have that indefinable appeal known as "charisma" or "star quality", and/or good looks/beauty. (Great actors have this too, but they can also act properly!") In this group you've got your Bruce Willises, JIm Carreys, Marilyn Monroes and James Deans.

All of this, of course, is just one person's opinion, and it is one of the great things about forums such as this that we can all have our own opinions and argue the toss about them.

But I do stand by my original assertion that Vincent Price, for all his "great" individual performances in certain films, was not in the pantheon of the truly great. Very few are. Mr Lee, of course, is, and that's why we all love him and revere him so.

Cheers

Lord Summerisle