SOURCE: Press Department, Universal Studios (undated, circa 1979 I presume)

--MOTION PICTURE NEWS--

"Dracula is always played as a black, evil ghoul," says Frank Langella, "I've tried to find the soft underbelly."

The tall handsome Langella is, of course, the star of Universal's "Dracula." His recent sexually hypnotic stage performance is credited with putting the massive international revival of interest in the infamous count into overdrive. 

Upon seeing Langella's performance, producer Walter Mirisch commented: "I truly had no idea what to expect. But he had created a completely different character, one with charm, sex appeal -- and most important of all, he endeared himself to the audiences. I decided right then to make the film."

Director John Badham, whose last film was the runaway smash hit "Saturday Night Fever," concurred: Langella makes him sexy, fascinating, and therefore dangerous. Evil doesn't have to be repulsive."

"It was an enormously difficult role for me to play," says Langella. "I didn't begin to grasp Dracula until I was close to opening in Boston for the previews. I finally began to understand him through his humor. One day in rehearsal I couldn't get the first act, when Dracula enters and is introduced to Van Helsing and the other characters. I suddenly thought to myself how would I feel if I'd been lying in a box all day and, when I got up, there was an invitation to dinner with two pretty girls, the doctor who lived next door, and a young lawyer. I would be rather delighted because I had something to do, and also because it would be fun to toy with these mere mortals. When that sense of pleasure in what he was came to me, other things began to develop and he became a man who seduced his victims rather than attacked them."

When he eventually opened in "Dracula" on Broadway, the effect was electric. New York theatre pundit Clive Barnes had no doubts: "Frank Langella is one of our few great actors."

"I think there's an aspect of the Count that's never been explored before -- his vulnerability, his sensitivity, his fear," Langella says. "We don't go into it heavily but we do go into it in the film. I've always felt that he's the kind of man if he has lived for 500 years and experienced different times and different cultures and different peoples, he's bound to have gained a certain amount of philosophy about life, so that he doesn't spend all of his time lurking and looking for blood. He needs blood to survive, but when he gets it, he has another 10 or 12 waking hours to pass. He can enjoy the company of other people, he can find himself more attracted to one woman than another, it doesn't have to be purely indiscriminate bloodletting.

"What I had to find was the key to what would make him work today. I decided he was a highly vulnerable and erotic man -- not cool and detached with no sense of humor or humanity. I didn't want him to appear stilted, stentorian or authoritarian as he was so often presented. I wanted to show a man who was evil, but lonely, and who could fall in love.

"Dracula knows what his problem is and he doesn't make excuses about it to women. He doesn't ask whether he can have their blood. He says 'I'm going to drink it -- because I need it.'

"It turned out that when I started talking to women before I played the part that they all saw Dracula in a very sexual way. When I came to do the love scene there was an audible swooning and sighing from the women in the audience at every performance."

After his long and close aquaintance, Langella is only too well aware of the fragility of the subject but treates the good Count with a nice irreverence. "A famous actor needs booze so he takes a few drinks. Dracula needs blod so he bites a neck or two. Does that make him bad?"

For all the acclaim, Langella has promised himself that his active involvement with the character would cease on the last day of shooting. For him there will be no revivals. Ever.

The Mirisch Corporation presents Frank Langella with Laurence Olivier in "Dracula," A Walter Mirisch-John Badham Production for Universal, produced by Walter Mirisch and directed by John Badham from a screenplay by W.D. Richter. Marvin Mirisch was Executive Producer.

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