If there’s one classic movie star I’d love to have met, it’s Boris Karloff. Now, he’s mostly remembered for his breakthrough role in Universal’s 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein: if you close your eyes right now and imagine Karloff, chances are it’s in green face paint with bolts in either side of his neck. But there was a hell of a lot more to him than that.

Karloff was an amazingly talented actor who brought something special to just about every role he played, and it would have been amazing to get the chance to sit down and talk to him about his life and career, to get his perspective on fame, Hollywood, horror, acting, and all the rest of it. Unfortunately for me, though, Karloff died long before I was born. He passed away 44 years ago, at the age of 81. The only consolation, really, is that he made a hell of a lot of films before then, and many of them are fantastic.

Obviously, Frankenstein is brilliant. Though it takes some fairly major liberties with the plot of Mary Shelley’s novel, it does a pretty good job of nailing the major themes: the hubris of science, the search for identity, the pain of isolation. Some of James Whale’s other Universal monster movies are a bit too silly for their own good, but here, the humour is kept to a minimum, and it’s all the better for it. It’s beautifully shot, scary, and genuinely affecting.

Frankenstein is so good that I want to say it hasn’t dated, but that’s clearly not true. I think what I mean is that its emotional core is still intact, and watching it now is still as striking an experience as it must have been at the time. And a lot of that is down to Karloff’s performance. He’s so dignified, even when he’s playing a creature made up of bits of corpses, that he imbues the character with real humanity.