If you are anxiously waiting for Tim Burton's Dark Shadows film (opening on May 11) starring Johnny Depp as vampire Barnabas Collins and are a fan of the original series, you probably cannot believe that the iconic actor who played that role in the TV show has died. Jonathan Frid was 87, but for all those fans of the 1960s soap opera, he is eternally ensconced in their minds as the love sick but thirsty vampire that became a national sensation.
I can still recall looking at my watch in school, waiting anxiously to get out that door and home to watch Dark Shadows. Filled with eccentric characters living in a spooky mansion on the coast of Maine in fictional Collinsport, Dark Shadows stoked my imagination with images of vampires, werewolves, witches, warlocks, and ghosts. The "ordinary" Collins folks (and they were really all rather bizarre each in their own way) were bewildered by the preternatural happenings in their house and town.
This was certainly a far different soap opera than the ones my mother and grandmother watched like All My Children or The Secret Storm. Here the opening credits showed a silhouette of a mansion with eerie music playing, a sea crashing against a shore, and then the waxy letters of the show's title splashing against the screen. It got me excited every time I saw it, and even the thought of it now still does (even though I haven't seen the show in almost thirty or so years).
Frid's Collins was a vampire with a conscience and a heavy heart, long before all the current incarnations of vampires in sappy movies and TV shows that have watered down the genre. Barnabas is made a vampire not by the bite of a bat but by a witch's curse, because he spurned her love for another woman named Josette. Centuries later in the modern day (1967 that is) Collinsport, Barnabas runs across the nanny to the Collins children named Victoria Winters, who bears an uncanny resemblance to his Josette. Of course, you can see where this is going.
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