Atomic Robot News: Carla Laemmle Turns 104 On October 20

Carla Laemmle Turns 104 On October 20

by Armand Vaquer

Above, Carla Laemmle at the 2011 Monsterpalooza. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

In five days, actress Carla Laemmle will be celebrating her 104th birthday.

She is the last surviving actress of the 1931 Universal Pictures' Dracula that starred Bela Lugosi.

According to Wikipedia:

Rebecca Isabelle Laemmle (born October 20, 1909) known professionally as Carla Laemmle is an American actress and the niece of Universal Pictures studio founder Carl Laemmle, she is of German Jewish descent. She was a movie actress in the 1920s and 1930s, and is, along with Jean Darling, Baby Peggy, and Mickey Rooney, one of the very few surviving actors of the silent film era.

Laemmle entered films in 1925 playing an uncredited role as a ballet dancer in the original silent film version of The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and a small role in the early talkie version of Dracula (1931), and is the last surviving cast member of both classic films. Laemmle continued to appear in small roles until the late 1930s, when she disappeared from the movie screen. She briefly came out of retirement to play a vampire in The Vampire Hunters Club (2001).

She shared her reminiscences of appearing in a bit part in Dracula (1931) by hosting the original documentary The Road to Dracula (1999), a supplemental piece included on the 2004 DVD release, Dracula: The Legacy Collection. In that classic film, she portrayed a bespectacled passenger riding in a bumpy horse-drawn carriage with Renfield as he is traveling to Dracula's castle. In this documentary, Laemmle proudly states: "I had the privilege of speaking the first lines of dialogue in the first talking supernatural thriller".