Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, July 5, 1990                   TAG: 9007040089
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ABINGDON                                LENGTH: Medium

ACTOR CAN'T SEEM TO SHAKE CURSE OF `DARK SHADOWS'

This particular vampire is arguably the most famous since Dracula - a century-old neck-biter named Barnabas Collins, featured on the Gothic TV soap opera "Dark Shadows."

Frid played the role from 1967, when the vampire character was added to inject new blood into the sagging series, until 1971, when the show ended. He also played Barnabas in a 1970 movie spinoff, "House of Dark Shadows."

Now he can't shake him.

Through the curse of typecasting, Barnabas Collins has continued to shadow Frid since the 1970s, even though the actor has moved on to other roles.

One of them is "A Shakespearian Odyssey," a one-man show Frid is performing at the Barter Playhouse in Abingdon through July 14. In it, Frid depicts some of Shakespeare's most dramatic and funny characters from "King Richard II," "The Tempest," "King Richard III," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Much Ado About Nothing" and "As You Like It."

Frid is no stranger to Shakespeare, having acted in English repertory for two seasons and touring the United Kingdom before returning to his native Canada as a featured player in the Toronto Shakespeare Festival. He also toured with the American Shakespeare Festival production of "Much Ado About Nothing" with Katharine Hepburn.

He also does two other touring one-man shows, "Fools and Fiends" and "Fridiculous." The presentations include readings from horror masters like Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King as well as humor from James Thurber and Robert Benchley.

This is Frid's first trip to the Barter.

Frid never had any interest in horror. "I was always into musicals, romantic stories," he said. He does not even watch many of today's gory TV shows and movies: "I'm so tired of this endless violence. I have nothing against it, it just bores me," he said.

"I love doing what I'm doing, but I'll never regret `Dark Shadows.' Half my audience is here every night because of `Dark Shadows,' " he said. "I know what side my bread's buttered on."

Even when he auditioned for the role of Barnabas, Frid said he thought it would amount to only a few weeks' work. "I've always been a frustrated professor. I have an M.F.A. from Yale, and thought I was going to teach. `Dark Shadows' came along and took me away from that."

He gave in to his agent's urgings to audition with the idea that the few weeks of work could send him to a West-Coast teaching job with a little more money.

But the vampire character lived to see many a sunrise, eventually changing from villain to semi-hero, or at least to a sympathetic character with whom audiences identified.

Frid recalls that the taping for the show was done in a single take and would be done over only if some horrible mistake occurred. On one show, he got the names of some of the other characters to whom he was talking mixed up, and waited all that weekend for a phone call telling him his career was over.

When he went back to work Monday, he apologized to the director for his mistake, only to learn that nobody even noticed it. The camera was on him when he was speaking, so nobody could tell who he was talking to in the shot.

"I'm a flubber. I think that's one of the things that keeps me so energized, I get angry at myself," he said.

But with all the gaffes and primitive special effects, Frid now feels that some of the "Dark Shadows" episodes hold up pretty well. But he did not care for the workload, especially when Barnabas became so central to the series that he was on every show and, on some days, in every scene.

Frid said he went to the producer and suggested bringing in some other spookery. Several monsters- or ghosts-of-the-week appeared on the show, and finally David Selby - a Barter veteran now in the TV series "Falcon Crest" - began attracting a lot of attention as a werewolf character. Losing some of the spotlight was just fine with Frid. "I'd had enough of it," he said.

Frid thought the attention would end in 1971 when the show did, but he kept getting invitations to "Dark Shadows" fan clubs and, when he got tired of questions about his character that the fans could answer better than he could, he began giving readings instead.

Some of the "Dark Shadows" shows are available on videotape, and plans are being made to launch a new series with different actors. Ben Cross will play Barnabas.

Does that bother Frid?

"No," he said. "I'm glad to have the curse passed on to somebody else."

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