Jonathan Frid

Jonathan Frid, born John Herbert Frid on December 2, 1924, in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, was a Canadian actor and Broadway performer whose career spanned stage, television, and film. The youngest son of Isabel Flora (née McGregor) and Herbert Percival Frid, a construction executive, Frid was of Scottish and English ancestry. He died on April 14, 2012.

Frid's early connection to performance began at age 16 with a production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals at Hillfield School. The following year he joined The Players' Guild of Hamilton, where American actress and director Gladys Gillan recognized his abilities. His studies at McMaster University in Hamilton were interrupted in 1944 when he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy and served aboard the destroyer HMCS Algonquin (R17). After the war he returned to McMaster, served as President of the Drama Club, performed in The Royal Family and The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and graduated in 1948 with the university's Honor Society Award for Drama.

In 1949 Frid was accepted at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. After two terms he left to work as a leading actor in repertory in Cornwall and Kent for two seasons and toured in the West End thriller The Third Visitor. Back in Canada, he spent three consecutive seasons as a featured player in the Toronto Shakespeare Festival, produced and directed by Earle Grey. He studied voice at the Lorne Greene Academy of Radio Arts and in 1952 appeared in Crime of Passion at the Jupiter Theatre. He also worked in radio and made several television appearances for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, including a role in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

In the fall of 1954 Frid enrolled as a graduate student at the Yale School of Drama in New Haven, Connecticut, pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Directing. Despite his directing focus, his experience made him a frequent presence in acting roles, including Julius Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra and the premiere of William Snyder's A True and Special Friend. During the summer of 1955, between his first and second years at Yale, director Nikos Psacharopoulos selected him for the inaugural season of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, where he performed leading roles in six of ten productions, among them The Crucible, Time of the Cuckoo, Light up the Sky, and The Rainmaker. His portrayal of Tullus Aufidius in Shakespeare's Coriolanus in his second year at Yale earned him an invitation to join the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, where he performed for two consecutive summer seasons under director John Houseman alongside Alfred Drake, Earle Hyman, Fritz Weaver, Sada Thompson, and Katharine Hepburn. After earning his MFA in 1957, Frid joined Hepburn and other company members on a national tour of Much Ado About Nothing.

Following the tour, Frid settled in New York City and made his off-Broadway debut in The Golem, directed by Robert Kalfin. In 1961 he adopted the stage name Jonathan Frid, first appearing under that name in the program for The Moon in The Yellow River. He continued performing in off-Broadway productions and regional theatres, including the Front Street Theater in Memphis, the Pittsburgh Playhouse, and the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. His most celebrated Shakespearean stage work during this period was the title role in Richard III at the 1965 Summer Festival of Professional Theatre at Pennsylvania State University.

Frid's Broadway career ran from 1964 to 1986. He made his Broadway debut as an understudy and performer in the 1964 production of Roar Like a Dove, directed by Cyril Ritchard and starring Betsy Palmer. His Broadway credits also include Arsenic and Old Lace. In 1969, during the run of Dark Shadows, he took a four-week hiatus from the television series to star in Frederick Knott's Dial M for Murder at The Little Theatre on the Square in Sullivan, Illinois.

Frid's American television career began in 1960 with the role of Thomas Percy, 1st Earl of Worcester in Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I as part of Play of the Week. Additional television work included an episode of CBS-TV's Look Up and Live, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and recurring appearances as a psychiatrist on the CBS soap opera As The World Turns. In early March 1967, returning to his Manhattan apartment after completing a national tour of Hostile Witness with Ray Milland, Frid received an audition request for a 13-week vampire role on the daytime serial Dark Shadows. He had been considering a teaching position at a Southern California university, but auditioned and won the part of Barnabas Collins, a vampire released from a chained coffin after 175 years. Before taping began, Frid collaborated with the show's writers, including Yale alumnus Ron Sproat, on the character's development. His approach — investing the villain with an emotional interior life — produced a vampire who depended on blood to survive while struggling to reclaim his humanity. The portrayal proved so popular that his short-term contract extended to four years, drawing as many as 20 million daily viewers to the previously struggling serial. Dark Shadows ran from 1966 to 1971, and Frid's performance as Barnabas Collins has been cited as an influence on later genre works including Twilight, True Blood, and The Vampire Diaries. At its peak, fan mail addressed to Frid at the ABC Studios in Manhattan reached upward of 5,000 letters per week. He appeared on The Merv Griffin Show, The Mike Douglas Show, The Dick Cavett Show, The Tonight Show, and as a mystery guest on What's My Line. In 1970, Frid made his American feature film debut reprising the role of Barnabas Collins in MGM's House of Dark Shadows, the first soap opera to be adapted into a feature-length film.