Were
you always interested in acting?
I'd
been interested in acting ever since I was a little girl.
I wrote my second play whilst I was in junior high, about
George and Martha Washington, and I've been interested in
acting ever since. I did a lot of acting in high school. I
went to college and was a theatre major and did three plays.
I later applied to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in
New York, where I was accepted as a full time student.
How
did you land a role on Dark Shadows?
When
I first graduated from the academy, I did summer stock again,
although professionally, through Equity. Then while I was
there, my agent called to tell me about this new soap opera
[Dark Shadows]. So I auditioned. The first role I was
considered for was Victoria Winters. Then a month or so later
I was called in again to read for the part of Maggie and I
got it!
Maggie
Evans seemed a bit more urban in the early episodes…
Yes,
in the very beginning, Maggie Evans was seen as the waitress
in the diner, who wore a blonde wig and was a very tough-talking,
gum-snapping kind of gal! [laughs] After Alexandra Moltke
(Victoria Winters) left the show, my character changed drastically.
I was no longer the waitress. I suddenly had a different accent
and a whole lot more education.
Do
you think that change suited you as an actress?
It
wasn't bad that she went in the direction she did and as far
as the ensemble playing was concerned, there had to be an
ingenue and she was in the victim role. So, as they had been
done unto Vicki, things were done unto Maggie! It was the
nature of this role, the protagonist role. Maybe if the show
had gone on longer, Maggie would have developed more into
her own woman and wouldn't have been so girlish, but, in actual
fact, I was quite girlish when I played her. There was a lot
of me in Maggie Evans. When you play a continuous role on
television, you quickly realise that it is a very intimate
medium. Soon, the writers on the show began to use me as a
model for the character. And so that person starts to become
more and more of yourself."
A
major turning point for Maggie seemed to be the death of her
father, Sam Evans…
I
remember the show where my father was gravely ill. I had to
prepare for that one a great deal as an actress. After that,
Maggie was effectively an orphan, completely on her own and
without any sort of protection. In fact, I think there was
then more significant bonding with the family up at Collinwood.
The reason they got rid of the father [latterly played by
David Ford] was simply that he was having an extraordinarily
difficult time learning his lines. One would never realise
that there are these practical concerns. The first father
[Mark Allen] was gotten rid of for the very same reason. The
second one developed this problem too. I mean he was a lovely
actor but [laughs]... You may remember that, for a while,
they made him blind. They made him blind so that he could
read the teleprompter! That's why even his ghost has dark
glasses!
You
were the first Dark Shadows actor to play a dual role,
as the ghost of Josette. How did that happen?
I
stopped by the studio one day to collect some scripts and
I wasn't working that day. I walked in and saw the producer,
Bob Costello, filming an insert for the following day's show.
They'd dressed up this dress dummy in bits of lace and put
a green light and a fan on her to give her this ethereal sort
of look. Her face was made up as if she had fallen off a cliff
and was bloodied. I asked what they were doing and remarked
that it didn't look very convincing. So I said to Bob Costello,
"Would you like me to put this stuff on? At least I could
flutter my arms or something." And he jumped at it and
said, "By all means." So they did and matted my
hair down with talcum powder and baby oil and put the green
light on me. And as I raised my arms, the fan made my eyes
water, so it looked like I had tears rolling down my face
- it was very effective. So then, I guess, because I had played
the ghost of Josette, when they decided that she should appear
as real, I was in place to play her. By then, the idea of
doing a costume drama and to play a role like Josette was
just heaven.
For
the 1795 storyline, did the doomed nature of Josette affect
your approach?
It
was so funny the way that things worked out on a daily basis.
One never made that connection. One knew that there was tragedy,
that something was happening, but the story of how it was
happening hadn't been written yet. And this was simply a ghost
coming back. In the early days, we knew only that this lovely
young woman was coming from Martinique, with her maid and
we had no idea. It's just the joys of acting moment-to-moment.
By
this time, Dark Shadows was firmly a supernatural show
- what was the cast's reaction to that change?
We
didn't like it. We thought we were doing a romance and all
of a sudden, we got into the supernatural and thought, "Oh
God, we're going to be doing Halloween every day!" When
we realised what an unbelievable success we had on our hands,
it just changed everything and we welcomed it. To do something
like that is quite remarkable. Actors drool to do something
that appealing: to play all those characters and to scream
and shout! So it was all very new to us and the thing that
really helped was that we had fabulous directors at that point
[Lela Swift and John Sedwick]. They were really wonderful
directors whom we trusted implicitly. So, when they gave us
a direction to go in, we absolutely followed it. I had a lot
of respect for [their input] so I just felt right with it.
Do
you think that the special demands of the show demanded good
camaraderie between the actors?
We
had new characters entering all the time. From the moment
that Lara Parker walked on the set, we knew that it was gonna
work. I think that is one of the reasons why Dark Shadows
has been such an enduring success: the casting was just a
wonderful blend of talents, faces and voices. It just worked!
During
1897, you played two characters - Rachel Drummond and Lady
Kitty Hampshire…
Yes...
Things got very muddled there for a while and I think that
Dan Curtis realised that he had caused his actors to double
up... and so there we were, doubling up! They just asked me
one day if I could do an English accent [for Kitty]. I made
a stab at it and, never having been to England, came up with
what I did!
What
are your memories of House of Dark Shadows, the first
Dark Shadows movie?
It
was wonderful to do, except that it was a little bit frightening
because I had never been in front of a movie camera before,
and there is a difference. We were all used to doing something
live and so on the first day, when we were doing several takes,
I became quite depressed. I thought I was doing something
wrong. I couldn't imagine why we had to do it again. I'd remembered
most of my lines and moved at the right times!
What
was your verdict on the finished film?
I
think that I could have been much better, and if I'd had a
better sense of myself as an actress, I think that I would
have been a whole lot better. It was very difficult. We were
literally working day and night and travelling back and forth
between upper state New York and Manhattan to do the show
and to do the film.
Jonathan
Frid has often said he felt that it was too violent…
I
think a number of us felt that way. But then, doing a [television]
horror show is one thing - doing it for a film audience that's
used to a tremendous amount of violence is quite another.
I think that Dan Curtis realised that he had to pull out all
the stops. However, I thought that given the circumstances
we had worked under, it worked out very well. It certainly
made a huge amount of money for MGM. I think it saved them
from bankruptcy that year, though I think they lost the battle
the following year!
In
1970, you left the show to move to Paris and Maggie was carted
off to the asylum…
[laughs]
For the final time! I don't think that Dan Curtis was very
happy about my leaving, and so rather than killing me off,
as he had so many times before, he sent me to a mental institution.
It was his little joke!
Looking
back, do you remember any special episodes?
There
were a few that I remember, but we were working at such a
fast pace that for the most part, everything simply blended
together. The ones that really stick in my mind were usually
the ones that required special effects. They were usually
the scariest and could be very difficult, because we had very
little time to rehearse our scenes. I remember the first episode,
because it was the beginning, for all of us. I especially
remember the one where Josette jumped from Widow's Hill, simply
because that was such an extraordinary show to do. There was
another where hands came up from a grave and above all, I
remember the episode where I was in the casket, because it
was a quite horrible experience.
Onto
another cult classic… What was it like working on Star
Trek: The Next Generation?
I
was very glad to have done it because I had been talking about
Dark Shadows and Star Trek in the same breath for
years. My feeling is that there is a tremendous similarity
between the two, certainly within fandom. Both Dan Curtis
and Gene Roddenberry were geniuses of a sort in taking these
universal tales - one going forward in time in a science fiction
sense, and one going back in time, in a Gothic way. Although
they had different approaches, they both ended up producing
morality tales. I was so pleased with the show I did [Who
Watches the Watchers?] because if anything proves my point,
my show fell into that morality tale category. It was wonderful.
You
later founded Pomegranate Press, which has published several
Dark Shadows books. How did that come about?
It
began because two of my dear friends had just died, Grayson
Hall [Julia Hoffman] and Joel Crothers [Joe Haskell]. I had
just returned to the States from England, where I had been
going back and forth and had done a couple of jobs, and I
was thinking of them, though I was also aware that Dark
Shadows was approaching its twentieth anniversary. And
there were all these people out there, who knew me from
Dark Shadows, asking about the show. So I sat down,
with a yellow legal tablet and a pencil and I just kept writing
- I didn't stop. This was before any of these books were really
done and I published it myself because there really was no
market for it then. Having published that first book, My
Scrapbook Memories of Dark Shadows, which did so well,
I was encouraged to do a lot of other books, and they did
well too.
Did
you ever see the 1991 Dark Shadows revival?
I
never saw it - I was actually in London at the time. Of course
the show premiered in the States during the Gulf War and therefore
a great many people didn't see it, which I think hastened
its demise. So by the time I got back to the States, it simply
wasn't on, though I have seen parts of it since.
Do
you think a revival of the show could work?
I
think that there is a market for it, probably more so than
a couple of years ago. I think it might do fine.
Summing
up, how does Dark Shadows fit into your career?
Very
specifically, Dark Shadows was my first job, and no
more than that. It didn't cause me to get other work. It didn't
give me a celebrity name as such, because I was simply too
young and it didn't open any doors whatsoever. In fact, most
of us were in danger of becoming typecast. However, the benefit
that Dark Shadows gave me was a wonderful training
period. After school, to be able to go into a show like that
and exercise was simply fantastic.
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