Helen Chandler: A Life of Heartbreak and Horror

Today we journey through the shadows of Universal’s Golden Age to uncover the life of Helen Chandler. This is a continuation of my promise to honor the women of the Universal Monster movies. Women who endured so much, not just on screen but behind the scenes, and who deserve to be as remembered as the men they worked with. Helen Chandler’s promising career paired with her personal struggles are a prime example of the fleeting nature of stardom - not just in the early days of the industry, but also today.

Nobody’s entirely sure exactly when and where Helen Frances Chandler was born. Perhaps it adds to her mystery! According to Helen’s family, she was born February 1, 1908, in New York. Other records though, report that she may have been born in 1906 in Charleston, South Carolina, or even New York in 1909. In his book The Very Witching Time of Night, Gregory Mank muses that in the end, maybe Helen Chandler wasn’t sure which was true. Helen Chandler grew up with her mother and little brother, Leland and her mom was a classic stage mom. She expected the kids to work from a very young age and kind of just saw them as trained animals. At best their mother was distant, and at worst she was strict and overbearing.

Helen had her first stage role at just 8 years old, and by 12 she was already performing in roles on Broadway, opposite John and Lionel Barrymore. She became well known in the theater world, appearing in The Wild Duck, Hamlet, Silent House, and The Marriage Bed. And of course, like so many before her, she followed in their footsteps to begin her transition to film in 1927. She didn’t like it at first - she didn’t like silent films - so she decided to head back to the stage until talkies were more popular a few years later.

The beautiful and talented Helen Chandler.

In her theater days, Helen Chandler crossed paths with so many people who would become her contemporaries in the film industry. In Hamlet, she worked with Horace Liveright who would go on to produce Dracula on Broadway. She worked with Claude Rains who would star in the Universal horror film the Invisible Man. It was perhaps when Tod Browning saw her appear in Silent House that he learned of her talent and kept her in mind when he was casting Dracula two years later. When Dracula was in pre-production in 1930, Helen Chandler wasn’t a Universal actress but actually with Warner Brothers. Universal paid Warner Brothers $750 a week to cast Helen Chandler as Mina in Dracula. And of that $750, Helen Chandler got all of it. For comparison, Bela Lugosi only made $500 a week to play Dracula himself.

If you saw my ranking of the Universal Monster women, then you know I ranked Helen Chandler’s Mina in last place, but my problem was not anything with Helen Chandler herself. She did the role really well, she was beautiful. My problem was just that it wasn’t a role that gave her a lot to do. To be fair, Helen Chandler didn’t even really want to play the role, she found it all kind of silly. Lucky for her she did play the role, because this is very much the role that she’s going to be remembered for forever.

Helen Chandler was fighting appendicitis for more than 6 weeks while filming Dracula. I admire her dedication, but I also have to wonder if persevering through that was the voice of her mother, whether in her head or literally in front of her, ensuring that she didn’t fumble the opportunity. I’ll tell you now that when Helen finally retired from the industry, her mom just 100% disappeared from her life. The day that Dracula wrapped, Helen Chandler went straight to the hospital so she could finally have that surgery.

A promotional photo of Helen Chandler and Bela Lugosi for Dracula.

Helen Chandler acted in more than 15 films over the next 3 years, but nothing captivated the public like her encounter with the Count. And behind the scenes, she was suffering. More than anything, she was lonely - despite having three marriages - and she turned to alcohol to cope. Her first marriage was to writer Cyril Hume in 1930. And I think some people lay some blame on him for Helen’s personal issues, but I’ve never been able to get a clear answer why. According to Helen Chandler’s sister-in-law Geraldine, Cy was a really wonderful man who adored Helen. But nevertheless, they divorced in 1934.

Her second marriage was in 1935 to actor Bramwell Fletcher who I best known as the Egyptologist at the beginning of The Mummy who reads the inscription that’s like, “if you open this you’ll be cursed forever!” And he’s like “let’s open it, let’s open it!”. I think (many people think) that he may have been using Helen as a career launching point, which is not a great start. Separately, it is very clear why their marriage didn’t work out. So, he and Helen are married. Helen is friends with Mary Astor. She leaves something at Mary’s place. One day goes over to pick it up, honks her horn outside. Guess who comes to the bedroom window? Not just Mary Astor but Bramwell Fletcher was with her. So, that was the end of that.

So finally, Helen Chandler marries Walter Piascik, who is a merchant seaman who she met in a bar. According to Geraldine, he was just some big dumb man, and Helen Chandler didn’t know how to be a normal person, and no marriage could survive that. I’m pretty sure he just shipped off to sea one day and never came back. I don’t blame Helen for everything - looking at you Bramwell Fletcher, but I do think that she could be a lot.

Helen Chandler never could seem to find true happiness for herself.

She lived on-and-off for years with her brother and sister-in-law in LA. She was admittedly terrible with money, and I’m sure the drinking didn’t help. If she wasn’t working, she was just so lonely all the time. She would sleep in late and wake up and spend the day with her nephew, doing her best to stay sober. I think she liked that he would give her his undivided attention, they could just kind of be little kids together. Then in the evening, she would wait on the porch for Geraldine to get home, almost like a puppy, and she’d want Geraldine’s attention all evening. Then when everybody went to bed, well then, she would start drinking and smoking and reading and she would just do that all night by herself. Then she’d sleep in late and do the whole thing all over again.

We haven’t even gotten to the biggest heartbreak yet,, but I just - I already feel so sad thinking about Helen Chandler’s life because all she ever wanted was love and attention. You know, that love that she couldn’t get from her mom, or that she saw glimpses of from stage or film audiences. At home, she would put on this big personality sometimes, she would dance around, she would tell all these stories. She would sometimes act impulsively for the laughs and for the stories, but on the other side of all this she was just drinking her sorrows away.

Helen Chandler was a child actress who appeared in many films, but Dracula will always be what she is best known for.

She acted in her last film in 1938 and made her last stage appearance in 1941. In 1950, as a result of falling asleep in bed while smoking and drinking, Helen Chandler was badly burned in a fire. Whatever pain she had carried before, it was magnified. Not only did she feel awful on the inside, but in her eyes, now she wore that outwardly as well.

During the 1950s, her brother committed her to an asylum. She stayed there for years, and when she finally got out, she was helped by the Motion Picture Relief Fund, and ultimately moved into a boarding house for people who’d been in the film business. Finally, she moved to a small apartment in Venice, which is where she lived when she passed away on April 30, 1965, due to complications during a procedure related to her alcoholism. She was not yet 60 years old.

For someone who began with so much promise and potential, it’s devastating to see the dark turn that Helen Chandler’s life took, but it’s also a reminder of how fickle and fleeting stardom can be. It’s a story that we’ve heard so many times before - a controlling stage mom, substance abuse, a never-ending longing for love and affection. As far as I know, Helen Chandler didn’t have a mean bone in her body. But Hollywood chewed her up and spit her out just the same.

I hope she’s at peace now. I think she would be really happy knowing that she’ll forever hold a place in film history because of her work as Mina in Dracula. Last year, thanks to a fundraising effort by Hollywood Graveyard, her ashes were moved from an inaccessible vault at Chapel of the Pines to the Cathedral Mausoleum at Hollywood Forever where now she can be visited all the time. I really want to go visit her soon, and I think anyone else who has the opportunity should too. I think it would be really nice if we all shared pictures when we go, to help keep her memory alive and show her that love. Tell me your favorite Helen Chandler roles, aside from Dracula. (You can say Dracula too, of course, but I’m sure we’ll all say Dracula!)