"Jonathan Frid, 87; actor helped give ‘Dark Shadows’ more bite" by Margalit Fox | New York Times" April 21, 2012
NEW YORK - Jonathan Frid, a Shakespearean actor who found unexpected - and, by his own account, unwanted - celebrity as the vampire Barnabas Collins on the sanguinary soap opera “Dark Shadows,’’ died Friday the 13th in Hamilton, Ontario.
Is that eerie or what?
He was 87.
He died of complications of a fall, said Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played several characters on the show.
Mr. Frid, along with several castmates, makes a cameo appearance in Tim Burton’s feature film “Dark Shadows,’’ to be released May 11. Johnny Depp stars as Barnabas.
Though Mr. Frid was the acknowledged public face of “Dark Shadows’’ - his likeness was on comic books, board games, trading cards, and many other items - Barnabas did not make his first appearance until more than 200 episodes into the run.
The character was conceived as a short-term addition to the cast, and early on the threat of the stake loomed large.
Broadcast on weekday afternoons on ABC, “Dark Shadows’’ began in 1966 as a conventional soap opera (with Gothic overtones), centering on the Collins family and their creaky manse in Maine.
The next year, with ratings slipping, the show’s executive producer, Dan Curtis, chose to inject an element of the supernatural.
Oh, the memories of Count Petofi, Quentin Collins, time travel, and soul transference. Those truly were the days.
Enter Barnabas, a brooding, lovelorn, eternally 175-year-old representative of the undead. Television vampires are legion today, but such a character was an unusual contrivance at the time.
The ratings shot up, and not only among the traditional soap-opera demographic of stay-at-home women.
I sheepishly confess to having watched.
With its breathtakingly low-rent production values and equally breathtakingly purple dialogue, “Dark Shadows’’ induced a generation of high school and college students to cut class to revel in its unintended high camp.
The producers shelved the stake.
Swirling cape, haunted eyes, and fierce eyebrows notwithstanding, Barnabas, as portrayed by Mr. Frid, was no regulation-issue vampire. An 18th-century man - he had been entombed in the Collins family crypt - he struggled to come to terms with the 20th-century world.
He was a vulnerable vampire, who pined for his lost love, Josette. (She had leaped to her death in 1795.) He was racked with guilt over his thirst for blood, and Mr. Frid played him as a man in the grip of a compulsion he devoutly wished to shake.
Mr. Frid starred in almost 600 episodes, from April 18, 1967, to April 2, 1971, when the show went off the air. (It remains perennially undead on DVD.)
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Long after “Dark Shadows’’ ended, Barnabas remained an albatross.
Mr. Frid reprised the role in the 1970 feature film “House of Dark Shadows’’; the few other screen roles that came his way also tended toward the ghoulish.
He starred opposite Shelley Winters in the 1973 television movie “The Devil’s Daughter,’’ about Satanism; the next year he played a horror writer in “Seizure,’’ Oliver Stone’s first feature....
As critical as he was of “Dark Shadows,’’ Mr. Frid was equally critical of his performance in it.
“I’d get this long-lost look on my face,’’ he told The Hamilton Spectator in 2000. “ ‘Where is my love? Where is my love?’ it seemed to say. Actually, it was me thinking: ‘Where the hell is the teleprompter? And what’s my next line?’ ’’
Funny Frid!
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Maybe someone should check the casket just in case.
Ironic that the AmeriKan media is closing its own coffin, isn't it?
And the real bloodsuckers of this world? Money junkies. Nothing supernatural about them.
