Trivia: Canadian actor Jonathan Frid received his master's degree in drama from Yale University. Frid spent the first 20 years of his professional life as a Shakespearean actor in both Ontario and the United States, and as a daytime-drama performer on such American series as Look Up and Live and As the World Turns. Work was seldom steady, and Frid was often as not in the unemployment line instead of the dressing room. Going the casting office rounds in 1966, Frid was hired by producer Dan Curtis to play a crucial role in a new ABC soap opera, Dark Shadows. At first glance, this was nothing out of the ordinary for a fortyish utility actor; but at second glance, there was nothing ordinary about Dark Shadows. The first Gothic daytime drama, Dark Shadows was chock full of ghosts, family curses, howls in the night-- and one 175-year-old vampire, Barnabas Collins. Frid's interpretation of Barnabas leaned more toward the erotic than the horrific, and before long the actor was receiving 1500 fan letters a week (mostly from young ladies who expressed a desire to have their necks bitten) and was the somewhat dazed object of numerous fan clubs. Striking while the iron was hot, Frid became a fixture of the talk-show circuit, reciting poetry and Shakespeare at the slightest provocation. The actor extended his Barnabas Collins characterization into a 1970 feature film, House of Dark Shadows. Frid was rather tired of the character before the daytime serial ended in 1971, but found that Barnabas had so effectively typed him that he was virtually unable to find any non-supernatural roles. Jonathan Frid hasn't been heard from much in recent years. (Ben Cross played Barnabas Collins in the short-lived 1991 primetime revival of Dark Shadows), but the faithful haven't forgotten him, as witness the many "official" Barnabas Collins Fan Clubs still dotting the landscape in the early '90s.

Trivia: The title of actress Joan Bennett's 1970 autobiography is The Bennett Playbill, in reference to the fact that she came from an old and well-established theatrical family: her father was stage star Richard Bennett and her sisters were screen actresses Constance and Barbara Bennett. Though she made an appearance as a child in one of her father's films, Joan Bennett did not originally intend to pursue acting as a profession. Honoring her wishes, her father bundled her off to finishing school in Versailles. Alas, her impulsive first marriage at 16 ended in divorce, leaving her a single mother in dire need of an immediate source of income. Thus it was that she became a professional actress, making her first Broadway appearance in her father's vehicle, Jarnegan (1928). In 1929, she began her film career in the low-budget effort Power, then co-starred with Ronald Colman in Bulldog Drummond. She was inexperienced and awkward and she knew it, but Bennett applied herself to her craft and improved rapidly; by the early '30s she was a busy and popular ingénue, appearing in such enjoyable programmers as Me and My Gal (1932) and important A-pictures like Little Women (1933) (as Amy). During this period she briefly married again to writer/producer Gene Markey. It was her third husband, producer Walter Wanger, who made the decision that changed the direction of her career: in Wanger's Trade Winds (1938), Bennett was obliged to dye her blonde hair black for plot purposes. Audiences approved of this change, and Bennett thrived throughout the next decade in a wide variety of "dark" roles befitting her brunette status. She was especially effective in a series of melodramas directed by Fritz Lang: Man Hunt (1941), The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), and The Secret Beyond the Door (1948). In 1950, she switched professional gears again, abandoning femme-fatale roles for the part of Spencer Tracy's ever-patient spouse in Father of the Bride (1950). Though her personal life was turbulent in the early '50s -- her husband Walter Wanger allegedly shot and wounded agent Jennings Lang, claiming that Lang was trying to steal his wife -- Bennett's professional life continued unabated on both stage and screen. Her television work included the 1959 sitcom Too Young to Go Steady and the "gothic" soap opera Dark Shadows (1965-1971). In failing health, Joan Bennett spent her last years in retirement with her fourth husband, media critic David Wilde.

Trivia: Lead actress, onscreen from the '70s.

Trivia: Stocky, blondish character actor John Karlen gained a mid-1966s following as Willie Loomis (and several other roles) on the Gothic TV soap opera Dark Shadows. Thereafter, Karlen became a fixture in other Dan Curtis productions, appearing in such feature-length Curtis endeavors as House of Dark Shadows (1970) and Trilogy of Terror (1973). In 1987, Karlen won an Emmy for his portrayal of Harvey Lacey, the contractor husband of Mary Beth Lacey (Tyne Daly), on the TV series Cagney and Lacey (1982-88); two years later he co-starred on the less successful video weekly Snoops. John Karlen's TV movie credits include the role of Jerry Barr in the execrable Roseanne: An Unauthorized Biography (1994).

Trivia: Educated at Cornell University, American actress Grayson Hall established her reputation on stage. Among her many theatrical achievements were Six Characters in Search of an Author, under the direction of Tyrone Guthrie, and The Balcony, supervised by Jose Quintero. Hall's first film was Night of the Iguana (1964), for which she received an Oscar nomination. The actress then played the kidnapped bank teller in Disney's That Darn Cat (1965), probably the biggest moneymaker with which she was associated. In 1966, Grayson signed on for ABC's supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows, playing a doctor who tried to cure Barnabas Collins of his vampirism but who wound up falling in love with him instead. Grayson Hall left Dark Shadows in 1971 for a long stint on another, more sedate daytime drama, One Life to Live.

Trivia: Blonde American leading lady Lara Parker came directly from the stage to daytime drama. Not so unusual, that: what was unusual is that Parker was not your typical long-suffering soap ingenue. She was, in fact, a witch--not a witch by disposition, but by birth, for she played glamorous 200-year-old Angelique on the Gothic serial Dark Shadows (1966-71). Lara was later more conventionally cast as Linda Vandenburg on another daytime cliffhanger, Capitol (1982-1987). Most recently, Lara Parker appeared in the 1990 TV movie The China Lake Murders.

Trivia: Supporting actor, onscreen from the '70s.

Trivia: Square-jawed American actor Mitchell Ryan was born in Cincinnati and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. During a 1951 Navy hitch, Ryan was assigned to a special services entertainment unit; he liked the experience so much that he decided to pursue acting as a civilian. He went to New York, accepting bit roles in over two dozen plays; he then moved on to leading roles at the Barter Theatre in Abington, Virginia. More New York work (under the direction of Joseph Papp) followed, and finally Ryan attained a small recurring role on the TV serial Dark Shadows (1966-70). A stage appearance with Irene Papas in Euripedes attracted critical attention and better jobs, including a supporting part in Monte Walsh (1970), Ryan's first film. Jack Webb utilized Ryan quite often in the '70s in his series O'Hara United States Treasury, then hired the actor as one of the four leads of the 1973 series Chase. In 1976 producers top-billed Ryan on the TV series Executive Suite. While the series didn't last, Mitchell Ryan subsequently received solid roles on such TV series as The Chisholms (1980) and High Performance (1983) and in such made-for-TV films as Flesh & Blood (1979) and Margaret Bourke-White (1989).