Peter Cushing Biography

Peter Cushing became cinema’s best known “Baron Frankenstein” beginning in 1957, with The Curse of Frankenstein, one of the more than 20 films he did with Hammer Film Productions.

Cushing got his start in Hollywood movies in the 1930s, but it was a brief chapter — after World War II broke out, he returned to England, where he worked on stage and in television during the 1940s.

Over the years Cushing played Baron Frankenstein, Professor Van Helsing (foe of Dracula) and Sherlock Holmes many times, and he came to be identified on screen as the stalwart gentleman who served as a bulwark against evil.

He also played Dr. Who in 1966’s Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.

Much of Cushing’s film work came in low budget horror films of the 1970s, and audiences since then also know Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin, the cadaverous bad guy in Star Wars who used the Death Star to destroy the planet Alderaan.

Cushing’s films include The End of the Affair (1955); Horror of Dracula (1958, with Christopher Lee as Dracula); The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959); The Mummy (1959); Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960); Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965); Frankenstein Created Woman (1967); The Vampire Lovers (1970); Tales From the Crypt (1972); Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972, starring Vincent Price); and House of the Long Shadows (1983).