Who, "of a certain age", doesn't remember Jonathan Frid's popular portrayal of gentleman vampire Barnabas Collins on the classic gothic daytime soap Dark Shadows? That role certainly gained Mr. Frid (1924-2012) a lot of pop culture attention and fans. (I personally, in childhood, owned a Dark Shadows lunchbox and corresponding thermos bottle, also the Barnabas Collins Dark Shadows Game - each mentioned thing which of course prominently featured illustration of Frid's Barnabas on the front of it.)

I was surprised when I learned, just the other year, that Mr. Frid was Canadian, rather than British. I always completely bought his Britishness when viewing Dark Shadows.

Following are excerpts from his 20 April 2012 New York Times obituary, authored by Margalit Fox:

Jonathan Frid, a Shakespearean actor who found unexpected...celebrity as the vampire Barnabas Collins on the...soap opera “Dark Shadows,” died...April 14....He was 87....// 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...chose to inject an element of the supernatural. Enter Barnabas, a brooding, lovelorn, eternally 175-year-old representative of the undead....// 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....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....// Mr. Frid received nearly 6,000 fan letters a week....// It was...an exquisitely unimagined career path for a stage actor trained at the Yale School of Drama and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London....//...Mr. Frid reprised the role [of Barnabas] in the 1970 feature film “House of Dark Shadows”; the few other screen roles that came his way also tended toward the ghoulish....

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