Lara Parker, 'Dark Shadows' actress from Memphis, has died

Lara Parker, the Memphis actress who achieved cult immortality as Angelique, the sinister, seductive and tragic witch who bedeviled vampire Barnabas Collins on the ABC daytime soap opera "Dark Shadows" in the late 1960s and early '70s, has died.

Parker, 84, died Oct. 12 at her Topanga Canyon home in Los Angeles. The death was not announced until Monday, Oct. 16.

Blond and blue-eyed ("a genuinely beautiful young woman," reported The Commercial Appeal, in 1972), Parker added a theatrical glamor to the Gothic grandeur and gruesomeness that made "Dark Shadows" a novelty in a network soap opera world typically more occupied with adultery than sorcery. Ruthless yet motivated by her unrequited love for Barnabas, Parker's Angelique was essential to the show's international appeal.

"I couldn't go anywhere in the world and not be recognized, from a Venice canal to a catfish restaurant in Arkansas," Parker told The Commercial Appeal in a 1998 interview, reflecting on the intense popularity of "Dark Shadows" in its heyday. "My kids wouldn't even let me pick them up at school, they were so embarrassed at how people would react."

Parker guest-starred on other TV shows and acted in movies alongside Jack Lemmon and Warren Oates, but never found another role with the impact of Angelique. She eventually made peace with that image, appearing at conventions that attracted thousands of fans and writing four "Dark Shadows" novels that amplified her character's back story.

"I say that Angelique continues to enchant my life," she said, after the publication of her first HarperCollins book, "Angelique's Descent," in 1998.

Born Mary Lamar Rickey in Knoxville, Parker grew up in Memphis, the daughter of longtime local Democratic Party activists Albert and Ann Rickey (who for many years kept a striking full-size portrait of their daughter as Angelique, painted for "Dark Shadows," in their Galloway Drive home). She was named "Lamar" for her great-great-grandfather, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II, a Supreme Court justice during the administration of Grover Cleveland.

She attended Central High School and Rhodes College (then known as Southwestern at Memphis), as well as Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where her roommate was Jane Fonda.

Parker acted in several local theater productions, but her first taste of show business was when she appeared as host Wink Martindale's sidekick on the WHBQ-TV teen program, "Dance Party," in 1958.

After college, she left Memphis to pursue an acting career in New York. She had been in that city only three weeks before she auditioned for and won the role of Angelique, joining a cast that included Jonathan Frid as a Byronic vampire, Barnabas Collins, and David Selby as a brooding werewolf, Quentin Collins. Rejected by Barnabas, the vengeful Angelique generally was presented as a spell-casting schemer, but her broken heart added a shade of sympathy to her supernatural femme fatale persona.

The series was set in the fictional town of Collinsport, Maine, a sort of fog-shrouded Peyton Place with ghosts, disembodied hands and time travel. The weirdness struck a chord with audiences in the era of "Bewitched" and the post-moptop Beatles. Like another short-lived but highly influential pop-culture phenomenon of the period, the TV series "Batman" with Adam West, "Dark Shadows" tapped into the 1960s Zeitgeist, bewitching Bohemians and squares alike, and inspiring children all over America to race home from school to catch each afternoon's episode.

"Dark Shadows" ran for 1,225 episodes, from 1966 to 1971; Parker joined the cast with episode 368. She also starred alongside Selby in the second "Dark Shadows" theatrical spinoff movie from MGM, "Night of Dark Shadows," in 1971. Four decades later, she made a cameo appearance in director Tim Burton's 2012 "Dark Shadows" movie, which cast Johnny Depp as Barnabas and Eva Green as Angelique.

Parker told The Commercial Appeal that acting in "Dark Shadows" had challenges beyond the usual five-episodes-a-week grind of a typical daytime serial. "In a regular soap opera, if you're talking near a kitchen table and a fly buzzes near you, you brush it away. But in the world of 'Dark Shadows,' if you're waking from a nightmare, and you're in a diaphanous gown, and you're visualizing a vampire coming at you in the moonlight, a fly can be pretty distracting."

Parker said her life beyond Collinsport was unusual during the "Dark Shadows" years, if not exactly Gothic. She spent much of her time, she told The Commercial Appeal, in "a sort of commune” in Chatham, New York. “We lived in tents and camped ‘round the fire and smoked grass and made bead necklaces and swam in the stream, naked. Everybody played music… It was pastoral and idyllic.”

After "Dark Shadows," Parker appeared in episodes of such television series as "The Six Million Dollar Man," "The Incredible Hulk," "Kojak," "Kung Fu" and "The Rockford Files," as well as in such movies as "Save the Tiger" (1973), for which Jack Lemmon earned the Best Actor Oscar. But in later decades, she focused mainly on literature, earning a master's degree from Antioch University and teaching creative writing courses in Los Angeles.

Unlike some "celebrity" authors, Parker — who returned to Memphis with some regularity over the decades, to visit family and school friends — wrote "absolutely every word" of her novels, she said. "I don't presume to say I've written a novel in the literary sense of the word, but I'm proud of it," she said about her "Dark Shadows" books. But she acknowledged her claim to Angelique was only temporary.

"'Dark Shadows' really belongs to the fans now," she said.

Parker leaves her husband, Jim Hawkins, a building contractor; and three children, Andy, Rick and Caiti.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Lara Parker dies: Actress who played 'Dark Shadows' Angelique was 84