Frankenstein, Marfan's Syndrome, and Everything

I've always been a fan of the actor Boris Karloff.  He had a haunting voice, a graceful style of movement, and some of the most expressive eyes I've ever seen.

Karloff's eyes in his classic role in The Mummy


Of course, Karloff will always be best remembered for his portrayal of Frankenstein's creature in three films throughout the 1930s.  It just so happens that I'm also a big fan of most anything to do with Frankenstein.  Boris gave the first portrayal of the creature in a style that was in step with the original novel.  Though his incarnation was incapable of much speech, the Karloff creature was sympathetic; a lost, sad being who never asked to be born and only wanted to be accepted by humanity.



Recently in digging through archives of photos of Karloff during the Frankenstein years and beyond, I had begun to notice a few things.   Karloff was a very slender man, possibly a result of his East Indian heritage (he was a great-nephew of Anna Leonowens, the Anna of The King and I, whose sister and a few other relatives had entered into mixed Anglo-Indian marriages).  But I had also begun to notice that he had a rather sunken chest in some photos.

Karloff stands for a bust on which the Frankenstein
make-up was modeled. Note the deep indention just below
his central chest.

It's a fact that Karloff had rather prominent ears, which were perhaps best captured on this action figure of the man, as well as very long, very thin fingers.

Karloff, again in his role from The Mummy.  Note
the thin, knobby-jointed fingers.

Some of these features started to sound very familiar, as if I had seen or heard of all of them in one person before.  And then I thought of Jonathan Larson, the late composer and playwright best known for the musical Rent.  Jonathan died of an aortic dissection on the day that Rent made its off-Broadway premiere.  It was later deduced that Jonathan had suffered from a genetic condition known as Marfan's Syndrome.

The syndrome effects many aspects of the connective and skeletal systems of the human body and often causes a host of noticable physical characteristics, among them many of the traits I had noticed in pictures of Karloff. He lacks one common trait, unusual height (he was 5'11", or 180 cm) but that does not all together rule out the possibility of Marfan's.

I began to wonder: could Karloff have been an undiagnosed sufferer? The syndrome had been identified in the late 19th century, but the genetic markers were not isolated until the early 1990s.

Jonathan Larson

I also learned that Karloff was exempted from service in WWI due to a heart murmer. This too could theoretically be connected to a possible diagnosis of Marfan's, as the heart is one of the organs most often effected by the syndrome (a la Jonathan's aortic dissection.)

Another area of the body which can be frequently effected by Marfan's is the spine. Scoliosis and a host of back problems can result. Karloff suffered back problems for much of the last half of his life, and in fact had numerous operations to alleviate some of his pain and difficulty. Most of this has been traced to a leg brace he wore during the filming of Frankenstein, and while that certainly could have been the source of many of the problems, I begin to suspect that it was not the root cause.

Of course, I'm not a doctor. This is all theory, just the ramblings of my mind. But wouldn't it be interesting to discover through genetic testing of either Karloff's remains or of his living relatives, whether Marfan's Syndrome had a well-known sufferer years before most people had ever even heard of its existence?