I was just surfing a few Bela Lugosi links and I found this photograph of him from back in 1955:

It was taken just before he was voluntarily committed to the state hospital for treatment as a chronic user of narcotics for sedation. I followed a few more links and found some rare footage of Lugosi, taken the day before he left the hospital. He’d been in there for three months.

I’m not sure who is interviewing him, but this was apparently Lugosi’s last on camera interview and he states that he was 46 lbs underweight when he was admitted, but had already regained 21 lbs. One of the things that I found most interesting about this interview was the reason that Lugosi got onto narcotics in the first place. He’d originally been prescribed them for a painful ailment and they had made him feel so good that he continued to use them even when he didn’t have any pain. How many times have we heard that before? Over fifty years have passed since that interview and people are still getting hooked on drugs after becoming dependant on prescription pain killers. Anyway if you want to watch Bela Lugosi’s final interview here is the link. He died the following year.