Some actors who have had success playing Dracula, such as Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, have gone through periods where they must have wondered if they'd ever get the chance to play anything else. Max Shreck, who starred in the first (unauthorized) film adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel, F. W. Murnau's gloriously contaminated 1922 silent horror poem Nosferatu, shook off the role easily in life, but posterity has boiled his career down to this one role. Shreck, who worked in the German theater and was part of Max Reinhardt's company in Berlin before making his film debut 1920 and died of a heart attack in 1936, when he was only 56 years old. Because he left behind no other film work as important as Nosferatu--his follow-up collaboration with Murnau, a comedy called Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs, was a bomb--and because he appeared in Nosferatu in a grotesque, rodent-like make-up that rendered his features unrecogniable, the passage of time has given Shreck the reputation of a man of mystery. The 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire, starring John Malkovich as Murnau, was a darkly comic fantasy in which it was revealed that "Shreck" was an actual vampire (played by Willem Dafoe) that the director had brought in to lend his authenticity to the role. It was rooted in a film-scholar in-joke that went back decades.
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