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Jonathan Frid (a Canadian actor best known for playing Barnabas Collins in the 1960s original vampire soap opera “Dark Shadows”) has died. He was 87.
Frid died Friday of natural causes in a hospital in his home town of Hamilton, Ontario, said Jim Pierson, a friend and spokesman for Dan Curtis Productions, the creator of “Dark Shadows.”
Frid starred in the 1960′s gothic-flavored soap opera about odd, supernatural goings-on at a family estate in Maine.
His death comes just weeks before a Tim Burton-directed version of Dark Shadows is due out next month starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas Collins. Frid has a cameo role in the new movie in which he meets Depp’s character in a party scene with two other original actors from the show.
Pierson said Burton and Depp were fans of Frid, who played a vulnerable vampire in one of the first sympathetic portrayal of the immortal creatures.
“Twenty million people saw the show at its peak in 1969. Kids ran home from school and housewives watched it. It had a huge pop culture impact” – Pierson said.
Pierson said Frid, whose character was added in 1967, saved the show and stayed on until the end of its run in 1971. He said Frid was never into the fame and fortune and just wanted to be a working actor. He said he loved the drama and finding the flaws and the humanity in his characters.

Jonathan Frid.

Mr. Frid, along with several castmates, makes a cameo appearance in Tim Burton’s feature film “Dark Shadows,” to be released on May 11. Johnny Depp stars as Barnabas.
Though the befanged Mr. Frid was the acknowledged public face of “Dark Shadows” — his likeness was on comic books, board games, trading cards and many other artifacts — 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. Enter Barnabas, a brooding, lovelorn, eternally 175-year-old representative of the undead. Today TV vampires are legion, but such a character was an unusual contrivance then.
The ratings shot up, and not only among the traditional soap-opera demographic of stay-at-home women. 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 comes 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.
Mr. Frid received nearly 6,000 fan letters a week. “I wish you’d bite ME on the neck” – read one, from a woman in Illinois.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xtoW82jcXw

Kathryn Leigh Scott, who co-starred with Frid on the original “Dark Shadows” and recently reunited with him to film her own cameo in the film, paid loving tribute to the actor on her website.
“I am so grateful to have worked with Jonathan, and to have known him as the charismatic, entertaining, complex and plain-spoken man that he was” – she wrote. “What fun we had working together! He was irascible, irreverent, funny, caring, lovable and thoroughly professional.”
Scott recalled the moment when Frid and Depp first met on the “Dark Shadows” set: “I won’t ever forget the moment when the two Barnabas Collinses met, one in his late 80′s and the other in his mid-40s, each with their wolf’s head canes. Jonathan took his time scrutinizing his successor’s appearance. ‘I see you’ve done the hair’ – Jonathan said to Johnny Depp, ‘but a few more spikes.’ Depp, entirely in character, replied, ‘Yes, we’re doing things a bit differently.’”
Frid also starred in director Oliver Stone’s feature directing debut, the horror movie “Seizure,” in 1974.
“Dark Shadows” ran on ABC from 1966 to 1971. Originally conceived as a straightforward gothic soap opera by creator Dan Curtis, it languished in the ratings until Curtis began adding supernatural elements, first a ghost, and then Barnabas Collins. Frid joined the show in 1967 and it began to take off as a cult hit, especially with younger children, who rushed home from school to watch the show.
Outside of the Barnabas role, Frid had an extensive stage career, including a Broadway and national tour of “Arsenic and Old Lace” in the mid-1980′s.
Frid began organizing staged readings of plays, poems and stories at “Dark Shadows” fan gatherings in the early 1980′s. The “Readers Theater” became a replacement for the Q&As with fans, which Frid had grown bored with. The shows, which also included scenes from Shakespearean plays and Edgar Allan Poe short stories, was one of Frid’s great passions in his later years.
Frid also maintained his website up until just a few months before his death, posting regular updates and communicating with his fans.