Vincent Price (1911-1993)
Filed under the name Vincent · June 1, 2026
Vincent Price built his fame on horror films, that unmistakable voice draped over decades of gleeful menace, but the detail that actually delighted me was learning he was also a serious, knowledgeable art collector, and, apparently, a genuinely competent cookbook author. That's an odd little constellation of interests, and I confess I find it charming precisely because it refuses the tidy single-lane biography people prefer to write. My husband Daniel was a historian who could discuss medieval trade routes and then turn around and cook an extremely mediocre dinner with total confidence, so I have a soft spot for people whose curiosity sprawls untidily across categories that aren't supposed to belong together. Price apparently approached collecting art with real rigor, not celebrity dabbling, which tells you something about how he actually spent his mind when the cameras weren't running. It is possible to be famous for one thing and quietly excellent at several others. I wish more public biographies made room for that instead of insisting a person only ever did the one thing we remember them for.