The man who spent his later years dressed as Father Christmas handing gifts to disabled children, won a Grammy for a beloved holiday classic and loved guacamole above all other foods was also the actor who defined the cinematic image of a stitched-together corpse. This deep dive examines the unlikely career of William Henry Pratt, born in London in 1887 into a family of British diplomats and Indian Civil Service officials. Of Anglo-Indian heritage, bow-legged, with a childhood stutter and a lifelong lisp, he dropped out of King's College in 1909, sailed to Canada, and dug ditches and laid railroad track to fund his nights in obscure touring theater troupes, permanently damaging his back in the process.

The episode covers his adoption of the name Boris Karloff around 1912 to spare his brothers embarrassment, his typecasting in exotic villain ...