Actor Clement Von Franckenstein Dies
A sad headline. Clement von Franckenstein was a British character actor who appeared in a number of movies in smaller roles, and guest spots in television. His most notable recent appearance was as the French President in The American President with Michael Douglas and Annette Benning. He also had parts in Lionheart with Jean-Claude Van Damme, Death Becomes Her with Meryl Streep, and in Hail Caesar! with George Clooney, playing Sestimus Amydias. He played George R.R. Martin the author of the Game of Thrones source books in the Bizardvaark TV series, and noted himself his connection to Frankenstein lore for his role as an extra in Young Frankenstein in his early days as “Villager Screaming through Bars”. For most of his acting days he went by the name Clement St George. He was listed in People Magazine in 2001 as one of “America’s Top 50 Bachelors” and he remained so.
I’m not writing this as an obituary, but because I had met him only just recently at a social event and we had a discussion about his name and its connection to Mary Shelley. In his family legend he liked to say that she borrowed the name for her book and had to change the spelling for legal reasons, or perhaps he had just heard that from somewhere. The name connection appears as a note in most of the bios being written about him. He was a charming fellow and often played urbane diplomatic types in later films.
His full name was Clement George Freiherr von und zu Franckenstein, and he was the son of Sir George Franckenstein, an Austrian diplomat who served as Ambassador to the Court of St James until the Nazi Anschluss of Austria in 1938, when he moved permanently to Britain. He apparently did not know his family all that well. His father and mother died in plane crash near Frankfurt, Germany in 1953 when he was nine years old and he was raised by family friends. He attended Eton College and served as a lieutenant in the Royal Scots Greys in the Middle East and Germany. He was a singer with a baritone voice and studied opera before focusing on acting.
The question of Mary Shelley’s taking the name for her book and main character from knowledge of a German/Austrian noble family and having to change the spelling is probably unlikely, but there is a connection. In her lifetime Mary Shelley never told where the name of Frankenstein came from. It is most likely to have come from the castle along the Rhine River from her elopement trip with Percy and Claire in 1814 as told in the Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley.
The Franckenstein (Frankenstein) family began as von Breuberg in 1200 when Konrad I built Breuberg Castle in the Odenwald forest between Darmstadt and Aschaffenburg, when they were called Breubergs. His son Konrad II, built another castle on the other side of Darmstadt around 1245, the one which still stands as a ruin, called Frankenstein. There likely was an earlier medieval fortification there with the name, as it means “stone fort of the Franks” and quite literally, any stone redoubt in the region along the Rhine from the dark ages where the Franks held sway may have been called a “frankenstein”, but the family took the name from it as Freiherr Von and Zu Frankenstein.
The Free Lordship of Frankenstein was a designation in Germany meaning it was an independent land only under the jurisdiction of the German Holy Roman Emperor. The family had land holdings in Nieder-Beerbach, Darmstadt, Ockstadt, Wetterau and Hesse. German Emperor Frederick II died in 1250 and the German kingdom fell into division. Two hundred years later, during the Protestant Reformation of Martin Luther in the 16th Century, the Frankenstein family sided with the Catholic Habsburg emperors and fought with the Protestant Landgrave of Hesse in the wars of the Schmalkaldic League.
The family sold their land holdings in Hesse to the Landgrave in 1662 and abandoned the castle. The title of Freiherr (Baron of the Empire) was formally granted to the family in 1670 by the Habsburg Emperor Leopold I. The family retired to lands in Franconia, distant from Hesse, and bought the Austrian Lordship of Thalheim Bei Wels just across the current German border in the 1800s. Family lines continue in Germany, Austria and England and those that came to America, including Clement.
Could the family have complained about the connection of the name to the horrific events in Mary Shelley’s novel? Is that why Mary never said the name came from a castle on the Rhine? The libel laws in England relating to a foreign family in 1818 would be limited and the changing of one letter would not be much of a disguise. Variation in spelling of names, especially German ones was very common.
The Von and Zu Franckensteins of Austria did not make an appearance in England until 1920, so only the European branch of the family could have heard of it, once it gained international notoriety. In the novel the family is Swiss and Italian in origin, so no formal connection to Germany or Austria. Was this a deliberate shift, or just that the main story details came from her visits to Switzerland.
Could she have known the family origin of the castle name? She might have been told of it on a visit, but more likely interested in another Konrad, its later owner, who dabbled in alchemy, Konrad Dippel, who manufactured a product called Dippel’s Oil, made from boiled animal bones and who promised the Landrave of Hesse he could find the Elixir of Eternal Life and ultimately died from apparently trying it out on himself.
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Guillermo del Toro wins BAFTA as best director for 2018
The Frankenstein legend has made another movie screen appearance, and of the latest incarnation of Frankenstein adaptation, Victor Frankenstein, reviews have been mixed to say the least, and the box office, rather a disappointment, though perhaps one might agree that it is if not the best, at least the most imaginative reimagining of the Frankenstein story since Frankenstein 1970.
The storyline has a modern day Baron von Frankenstein who was tortured and physically mangled at the hands of the Nazis in post WWII Germany, because he refused to use his science skills for the Nazi war effort. The Baron is continuing his work as a scientist, but needing money to continue his experiments, he agrees to rent out his castle as a film location to a movie crew to film a television movie about his famous family, and his grandfather, the old Baron von Frankenstein of monster reputation. Little do they know the current Baron is following in his ancestor’s footsteps. The money allows Frankenstein to obtain a nuclear reactor to power his creation, rather than the old standby lightning bolts. But when he runs out of body parts he starts killing off the members of the film crew. This is done through his partially completed monster, a lumbering figure with his head completely bandaged, serving both a story function in the later reveal, and a budget saving device of not having to create a monster make-up. His creature has no eyes at first and kills the wrong girl, until he can get the right ones. When the end finally comes in a climactic burst of atomic reactor steam, and the bandages are removed, inside them is revealed the face of Karloff/Victor Frankenstein as he was before he was tortured, with a recoding played explaining that the Baron was trying to create a lasting version of himself for perpetuation of the family name.
On an entertainment level it was very low budget and a bit of a cheat, with the monster. a mummy-like creature, a guy stumbling around in a bandage helmet ranking somewhere between Phil Tucker’s Robot Monster (a gorilla suit with a space helmet) and Project Metalbeast (with Kane Hodder – Friday 13th’s Jason, in a rented werewolf suit) but certainly an imaginative take on the legend and the lore of extending the Frankenstein world. I don’t know what poor Boris Karloff felt about it, but I can imagine. His career had reached a nadir in the late fifties. Abbot and Costello had come and gone, and Hammer horror was taking over the classic stories with new stars like Christopher Lee. The aging great horror star would see a bit of a resurgence in the early 1960’s, with some modestly decent horror projects, but perhaps a more reverent casting in television, where he would appear in episodes of shows like I Spy as a kindly but eccentric old gentleman in a Don Quixote quest, and even lend his name to a series of spooky comic books from Gold Key.
was announced at the MIP television conference in Cannes that the UK based ITV limited series “Frankenstein Chronicles” had been picked up by the A&E network for broadcast in the U.S., but with changes to that network, never quite made it. It has now been picked up by Netflix.
