Lara Parker, who found the role of a lifetime at just 28 years old when she was cast by Dark Shadows producer Dan Curtis as the beautiful, vengeful and altogether evil witch Angelique Bouchard Collins, died October 12 in her sleep in Los Angeles following a battle with cancer. She was 84.
Her death was announced by producer Jim Pierson of Dan Curtis Productions, on behalf of Parker’s family.
“I’m heartbroken, as all of us are who knew and loved her,” said her Dark Shadows co-star and longtime friend Kathryn Leigh Scott in a statement. “She graced our lives with her beauty, talent and friendship, and we are all richer for having had her in our lives.”
Parker, who also authored four popular Dark Shadows-related novels from 1998-2016, arrived on the supernatural soap opera in 1967, not long after Canadian actor Jonathan Frid had been cast as vampire Barnabas Collins. Frid’s storyline changed the show from a moody, Gothic Jane Eyre-type serial into a flat-out horror show.
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When Curtis and the show’s writers decided to do a six-month story arc set in 1795 to show how Barnabas had become a blood-sucker, they set about finding an actress who could play the witch who had set the curse on him way back when. Although some cast members had imagined a raven-haired sorceress, producer and creator Curtis apparently saw something in the blond, green-eyed, Southern-accented Parker that screamed Martinique witch.
As with most of his gut instincts, Curtis was right. No sooner had she arrived on the show in autumn 1967, as an unassuming servant girl to Barnabas’ fiancée Josette du Prés (played by Scott), when she began casting spells, uttering incantations, turning one foe into a cat and, by the end of the flashback arc, summoning the bat that would curse Barnabas for eternity — all while filling the small screen with her big, stunning green eyes, widened to a maniacally effective extent.
Parker became an instant sensation, at the time rivaled only by Barnabas among the show’s youthful fandom. So popular was Parker that she appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and “bit” the host on the neck after putting in her specially-made vampire fangs.
Parker, who would stay with the series until its cancellation in 1971, played multiple characters — but nearly all of them aliases of the duplicitous Angelique. She’d briefly play Angelique as a vampire and for several months donned a shortish black wig and very ’60s lime-green miniskirts to disguise herself as Cassandra Blair, who, with a little spell-casting magic, quickly married into the wealthy Collins family.
But sooner or later, Angelique proper would return to make trouble for the Collins clan, as fans demanded no less.
Leaving New York City, where Shadows was taped, for Los Angeles with her then-husband and two small sons, Parker often would say in interviews and at the many Dark Shadows conventions she attended that she expected the four-year phenomenon that had been daytime’s first supernatural soap to open Hollywood’s doors. But being the subject of countless fan magazine articles, interviews and promotional events couldn’t outweigh Hollywood’s antipathy to soaps, especially one that had been as campy as Dark Shadows. Parker would say that she thought Angelique would be a springboard to movie roles but would realize late in life that the witch had been her greatest and most enduring part.
Born Mary Lamar Rickey on October 27, 1938, in Knoxville, TN, Parker attended Vassar and Memphis’ Rhodes College before earning a master’s degree at the University of Iowa. Having done some summer stock, Parker, then living in Wisconsin with her husband and two young sons, announced to her family that she was heading to New York, at least temporarily, to give acting a shot.
The gamble paid off, and quickly. Within days of arriving in New York in 1967, Parker was cast as Angelique. Her husband and sons soon joined her, and the family lived in the West Village until moving to L.A. in 1972. She’d already filmed her first major movie role toward the end of the soap’s run, 1971’s Night of Dark Shadows, the second spinoff movie from the series following the previous year’s more successful House of Dark Shadows.
If Hollywood wasn’t exactly waiting with the open arms Parker anticipated, there were certainly enough roles to provide some encouragement. Within a couple of years after moving to L.A., she’d had guest roles on such series as Kung Fu, Medical Center, Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law, The Six Million Dollar Man, Police Woman, The Rockford Files and, in 1975, a one-off role as yet another witch in a Curtis production, Kolchak: The Night Stalker. She would not remember that job fondly, recalling years later the stinging rudeness of star Darren McGavin, who apparently had no idea who she was when he suggested that she’d need practice to learn to play a witch.
Parker would continue acting, increasingly sporadically, through the 1980s and early ’90s but largely had retired from the business when Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, both fans of the original supernatural soap, came calling: They invited Parker, Scott, an ailing Frid and their co-star David Selby (he played the rakish Quentin Collins, a ghost and werewolf) to make cameos in their upcoming big-screen Dark Shadows reboot feature film. The quartet’s appearance did in fact make the final cut, albeit briefly. None of the originals was particularly fond of the jokey 2012 film.
In her later years, Parker turned to writing and teaching — her novels include Angelique’s Descent (1998), The Salem Branch (2006), Wolf Moon Rising (2013) and Heiress of Collinwood (2016). The books proved popular among Dark Shadows‘ still-devoted, conventions-attending fan base, as well as devotees of romance and horror genre novels.
Parker kept in touch with her co-stars including Scott, Selby, Roger Davis, the late John Karlen and others throughout her life, particularly once the conventions became annual events in the late 1980s through the 1990s and up to the 50th anniversary celebration in 2017.
Many of the original cast, including Parker, recorded a series of Dark Shadows audio dramas in the 2000s released by Big Finish Productions. They also reunited for a “Smartphone Theatre” Zoom-style, Covid-era performance of A Christmas Carol in 2021 and, on Halloween night 2020, a YouTube/Zoom Dark Shadows cast reunion.
Parker is survived by second husband Jim Hawkins, daughter Caitlin, sons Rick and Andy, and their wives Miranda and Celia; and grandson Wesley.
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October 17, 2023 at 05:33AM
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Lara Parker Dies: ‘Dark Shadows’ Scene-Stealing, Spell-Casting Witch Angelique Was 84 - Deadline
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