...I'm posting my interview with Rudley about ON BORROWED TIME, because it says a lot about HIM too. I just spoke to his wife; he went into the hospital because of emphysema and died there late Saturday night (heart attack). He was happy to the end, said Mrs. Rudley (Herb's fourth wife), "and it was like he just went to sleep."

Herbert Rudley on Boris Karloff

A native of Philadelphia, actor Herbert Rudley made his first stage appearance in 1928 and has since enjoyed a long career in theater, motion pictures and television. (Horror movie fans will remember him as Dr. Ramsay, the young English physician acting as unwilling assistant to mad medico Basil Rathbone in the all-star chiller The Black Sleep, 1956.) In the mid-1940s, Rudley and Keenan Wynn began their own Los Angeles theater group, and one of their four productions was a revival of On Borrowed Time with Boris Karloff.

Let me start by explaining how I started that group. If I remember correctly, it was called Actors Productions or Actors Theater, I don’t remember which. At that time, there were very few “little theaters” in L.A., the little theater movement hadn’t started yet. My idea was that, in order to get a theater to go, to draw the public, you had to have at least one star performer—that is, from motion pictures. But that wasn’t sufficient reason to start a theater, from my point of view. So the premise of our theater was that it would allow stars to break the mold that they were cast in, in motion pictures. Each play would feature one of those actors, desiring to get away from typecasting, plus a newcomer or relative newcomer who hadn’t made it yet. I got Equity to give us permission to rehearse for three weeks instead of the two-week period [usually permitted] for stock companies, and each show was to play four weeks. Keenan Wynn and I started that theater together. I had directed him in a play out at Laguna Beach the summer before—The Petrified Forest, with Keenan as the gangster.

I got permission from MGM and 20th Century-Fox to start the series with Tyrone Power in The Petrified Forest and Judy Garland in Stage Door. On the basis of those two announcements, we had for the first time in the history of L.A. an advance sale of 60-some thousand dollars. Unfortunately, though we had permission from the studios to use these two stars, we could not have a written contract with them because they were under contract to the studios. We announced that we were opening with Tyrone Power in The Petrified Forest—Power would have played the role that Leslie Howard played in the film [1936]. But our first setback was, there was an actors’ strike at that time and all of a sudden 20th Century-Fox sent Power down to Mexico to do the picture Captain from Castile [1947] and avoid the strike. So we lost him. I called Judy Garland and asked her if she could step it up, re-arrange her schedule, and she said yeah, sure, she could. We announced that we had to postpone Tyrone Power in The Petrified Forest and that now we were opening with Judy Garland in Stage Door. So that didn’t affect the advance sale. Except that Metro then pulled Judy Garland and put her in a new musical! So we lost both of them. And our box office was reduced to zero!

        We put on our productions at the El Patio Theater on Hollywood and LaBrea, an 800-seat theater that has since been torn down. The first play we did was a revival of The Desperate Hours, the first of the psychological thrillers in the theater. George Coulouris had played the father in the original New York production, and I cast him in our production. He told me during rehearsals that, although he had played the part for over a year in New York, he never really understood what the play was about until we did ours [laughs]. That was a pretty nice compliment! Next we did Twentieth Century with Keenan Wynn in “the Barrymore part,” and then we did On Borrowed Time.

On Borrowed Time was a play that I always loved—a very touching play. I thought of using Boris Karloff in it. I got the idea that Karloff would [under ordinary circumstances] be cast as Death, and so I decided to use him as “Gramps,” which was a reversal, a complete turnaround. We had a great cast—Beulah Bondi as “Granny,” Margaret Hamilton as Demetria and Ralph Morgan as Death, the role that would “normally” have been played by Karloff. And then we had a young newcomer, Tommy Ivo, play the kid, “Pud,” and he was marvelous in it.

I had not met Karloff before that. He was a wonderfully intelligent man, totally contrary to the kind of roles he played. He was quite brilliant, a marvelous linguist—I don’t remember how many languages he spoke, but quite a few. Very, very modest…very erudite…and a very hard-working actor. He was always the first one there at rehearsals and the last one to leave. He had a zest about him still, and he enjoyed the whole idea of playing a role that he would normally not be cast in. So we had a great time together.

The public, unfortunately, shied away from On Borrowed Time. People came to see Boris Karloff in On Borrowed Time thinking they were going to see him like they saw him in the horror films, they expected to see him playing Death. So when they saw him as the kindly grandpa, they were completely bewildered! He got good reviews, but the public shied away because they expected horror from Boris Karloff. However, the reaction was good once they adjusted to the new idea. And the reviews were excellent.
It was a wonderful production. And, consequently, the Theater Guild in Manhattan, the foremost theater of drama in the ’30s and ’40s, started negotiations to bring it in as a revival—they had done the original play. But it never materialized for some reason, I don’t really know why.

All the stars we used, even Karloff, got $55 a week, regardless of what their motion picture salary was. They were being paid actors’ minimum, which at that time was $55 a week, and yet they came to each production with such zest and interest and vitality because it was a chance for them to get back on the stage. All of them had been involved in films for many, many years and had gotten away from the theater, so they really loved the venture. And we had wonderful reviews in all the plays.

Our fourth production was Macbeth. I as an actor had already appeared on Broadway in the Maurice Evans-Judith Anderson Macbeth, I played Macduff in the original version. And I couldn’t stand Maurice’s performance as Macbeth—he was so bad in it. He was terrible! Judy Anderson should have played Macbeth and he should have played the queen [laughs], because she was so much more powerful than he was. So we decided on doing a young production of Macbeth in which I did the Macbeth role. It was an interesting production…and our last production.

The reason we failed was that the woman who put up the backing for us [gave us problems]. I had said to her, “Now, look—we’ll accept your money, but you have to understand that you have nothing whatever to do with the creative end. You don’t ‘buy’ that, you just give us the money and you’re a sponsor of the theater. That’s all.” She said, oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And of course she tried to do everything. For example, our idea was a modest-priced theater, a $3.50 top ticket, so that we could draw on the popular audience instead of the chi-chi group. And of course she wanted only the chi-chi group, because of her friends—“It would be demeaning to tell them that they were going to a theater which only cost $3.50.” We said, “You don’t like that idea? Okay, here’s your money back,” and we gave her all her money back. And then of course we were strapped, because we were dependent then only on our income from the productions. At the end of four plays, we had to give up the ghost. Unfortunately, I lost all of the data about that venture in the Bel-Air fire in 1961. My home burned to the ground, so all of my memorabilia of the theater and motion pictures and television was burned up. I don’t have any of the records.

My memory of Boris Karloff is that he was a very, very dedicated actor and that he had a real depth about him, contrary to the superficial things [the horror movies] that we saw him in.