The history of Hollywood – and a few other places – is strewn with forgotten heroes, but none have been quite as thoroughly strewn, or forgotten, as Igor.

This is strange indeed because if you so much as mention the name Igor to most people, they will immediately think of a goggle-eyed hunchback who opens large, iron-bound doors with an ominous creak and says something like “The master was expecting you” in a vaguely East European accent. Yes, everyone seems to remember Igor the character, yet few remember Igor the actor.

What makes this truly sad is that, in the course of a career that started way back in the 1920s, Igor portrayed a huge variety of leading and supporting actors ranging from an anonymous bit-part player in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to Bela Lugosi, to Marty Feldman and even, in a spectacular bit of type-casting, to Charles Bronson. And that is to name but the obvious few.

Charles Bronson

In fact, Igor has played a huge variety of roles including Bette Davis, Loretta Young, Orson Welles, Sylvester Stallone and, more recently, Keira Knightly and Hugh Grant. And yet no one even knows his last name.

I think you’ll agree that to play so many very different parts, calls for acting ability of the highest calibre. But who, in fact, was Igor? Who was this master of accent, idiom and - let’s be frank – disguise? Who was this man who was never honoured in his own right by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts or even the National Transylvanian Academy of Retired Igor Players?

Igor was born in obscurity to a family of low-paid goggle-eyed hunchbacks in the town of Weissenberg in 1907. His parents, Mr and Mrs Igor, worked as mouse-stuffers for the local taxidermist. It was hard, grinding work – particularly the legs – and there was rarely meat on the Igor’s table. Well, no meat that wasn’t ground mouse anyway. To relieve the burden on the family, little Igor ran away to join a company of travelling insurance brokers.

Summer in Transylvania

It was while selling third-party, fire and theft car insurance in the villages of Transylvania that Igor discovered a talent for acting. Light comedy appealed to him in particular and he joined a succession of local drama groups. It was while playing in a production of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (he played the fan) that he was spotted by the roving impresario and theatrical agent Leonid Brezhnev.

Broadway was soon to follow. Igor shone as a door-stop in Slapsie Maxie Comes to Town but finally got his big break playing a piano in The Rise of Rosie O’Reilly. In a review of the production, the New York Times said: “Ruby Keeler was a stand-out as the third chorus girl from the left but the true star of the production was Igor the piano. I particularly loved the moustache”.

Igor as a door-stop in Slapsie Maxie Comes to Town

The lure of Hollywood proved irresistible but playing a door-stop and a piano on Broadway was no immediate guarantee of success. Igor joined the thousands of wannabes queuing at Central Casting and kept hunch to back by checking that the users of public lavatory cubicles were still alive. Finally, in 1925, he got his first big break in a Mack Sennett comedy called Sneezing Beezers in which he played a goggle-eyed hunchback. After years of playing inanimate objects, this was a true breakthrough. Unfortunately these were still the years of silent movies so Igor’s one line, “The master was expecting you”, appeared in text with a scroll border and a few major chords from the pianist.

Small though his part was, Igor had caught the eye of directors and producers. Sneezing Beezers was followed by a number of Mack Sennett one-reelers. Soon his popularity was such that audiences would virtually ignore stars like Ben Turpin and Billy Bevan, waiting in anticipation for the goggle-eyed hunchback.

It was time for a makeover

By 1928, the days of the silent movies were over. Talkies became all the rage. Not that Igor noticed very much of this as he never went to the cinema. This was not because he feared the adulation of the public but more that he could never get into a position that allowed him to see the screen.

1931 saw the first real high-spot of his film career: Frankenstein. Unfortunately, these were definitely the days of type-casting and Igor was cast as a mad hunchback called Fritz. Determined to show the studios what he could do, he subsequently made Son of Frankenstein and The Ghost of Frankenstein, in which he expanded his repertoire by playing Bela Lugosi.

This gave Igor an idea. He set to work reinventing himself. While many stars of the 1930s were indulging in wild parties fuelled by alcohol and cocaine, Igor could usually be found working out at the local gym and hammering his hunch with a wooden mallet. He solved the problem of his goggle eyes by simply sucking his cheeks in, which was so successful that he landed the part of Katherine Hepburn in Morning Glory, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actress.

Katherine Hepburn

We can fast-forward over the years that follow. Suffice to say that many of our favourite actors were, in fact, Igor. His versatility was astounding. Here are just a few examples: Humphrey Bogart and a reprise of Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen, Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot, Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, R2D2 in Star Wars, Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Gollum in Lord of the Rings, Johnny Depp and Keira Knightly in Pirates of the Caribbean…

Sadly, Igor passed away on September 17th 1840. In spite of winning an enormous number of awards for his work, his oeuvre has never been appreciated in its own right. It is time to redress this balance.

Mind you, a lot of actors will be out of work.

Igor and his mother relaxing in the sauna