CHASING ‘DARK SHADOWS’
New documentary looks at Hamilton actor Jonathan Frid and the vampire he made famous
It was a cold, overcast day in March 1981 when I arrived in Hamilton on a GO bus with a piece of paper in my pocket that said “44 Frid,” the home of The Hamilton Spectator at the time.
Frid Street. What a perfect name for the address of a newspaper, I thought. Straight forward. To the point. The minimum of syllables.
I was a Carleton University journalism student, from Ottawa, who was among 30 hopefuls vying for 10 summer reporting jobs by taking part in a series of interviews and tests of suitability.
One of the tasks was to quickly craft a story from a pretend news conference hosted by a real-life Hamilton-Wentworth police staff superintendent whose name was also Frid — George Frid.
I didn’t know who these Frids were, but there seemed to be a lot of them in Hamilton.
Well, all these years later, the name has come up again with a new, fascinating documentary called “Dark Shadows and Beyond. The Jonathan Frid Story.”
Jonathan (1924-2012) — an actor from Hamilton who gained great fame in the U.S. with the role of vampire Barnabas Collins in the melodramatic 1960s soap opera “Dark Shadows” — is part of the family for whom Frid Street is named.
Frids, from one generation, ran a brickworks company more than a century ago that morphed, in the next generation, to a successful construction business. Jonathan came along in a third generation to strike out a far different career than his forebears.
And the cop at the conference — who later rose to become a deputy chief of the police department before retiring — is also related, although more distantly.
I reached out to Mary O’Leary, the Los Angeles-based producer and director of the one hour and 40minute film. It was released last fall and recently became available through the U.S.-based streaming service Tubi that also offers dozens of original “Dark Shadows” episodes that ran from 1966 to 1971.
O’Leary was a longtime friend and business associate of Jonathan Frid. As a teenager growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, she would hurry home after school to watch the heartthrob fanged actor on television. As an adult she found work in soap opera production in New York City with iconic programs such as “Guiding Light,” “General Hospital” and the “The Young and the Restless.”
After crossing paths with Jonathan in the mid-1980s at a fundraising event, she wrote a letter to him. They met and ended up working together to create tours of one-man shows that had him travelling around the continent. The performances highlighted the range of his acting talent from vampire bits to highbrow sketches that were more in line with his theatrical aspirations.
Several years after his death at the age of 87, she was asked by the production company, MPI Media Group, to take on the documentary project. Much of the filming and research took place in Hamilton in 2019 to cover off the first two decades of his life and his retirement years in Ancaster from 1994 to 2012.
John Frid, as he was known when he was a boy, first got the acting bug through drama productions at Hillfield school (later called Hillfield Strathallan) in Hamilton. In his late teens, he performed with the Players’ Guild of Hamilton, and then as a McMaster student he headed the university’s drama society, before graduating in 1948. From there, he attended the Royal Academy of Arts in London, England and received a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Drama in 1957.
While living in New York in 1967, after years of countless theatrical roles there and elsewhere in the U.S., he received a phone call from his agent that would change his life.
Producers of the struggling “Dark Shadows” soap wanted to introduce a vampire character for a plot twist over several episodes to try to help with ratings.
The fans loved it. The franchise was saved, and he continued for the next four years appearing in 600 shows. It was a hit across the U.S, but not in Canada because the show was not generally available here.
The retrofitted program spawned books, board games and conventions. He became a household name capable of drawing massive crowds.
“It was the first time there was a vampire who wasn’t just a monster, like Bela Lugosi. He was a monster who didn’t want to be a monster,” says O’Leary. “He was vulnerable. He felt guilty when he had to bite someone’s neck for blood.”
Through the 1970s and early ’80s, he performed in regional theatre productions across the U.S. before focusing attention on the one-man shows. In the mid-1990s, he returned to his roots to retire in a house on Wilson Street in Ancaster.
“He was so happy that he could slip back into that life that he lived when he was younger,” O’Leary says.
Frid’s cousin, Dave Howitt, says he also liked the fact that Canadians didn’t generally recognize him as Barnabas Collins like Americans did. Although, he said, a careful eye would notice Jonathan walked with the same silver wolf-headed cane that he used in the show.
“He was a sweet man, a very gregarious fellow. He always played down his celebrity. And it was easy to do in Canada. It was such a bizarre thing to be so famous in the U.S. and so anonymous here.”
And Jonathan, who never married or had children, knew his family history ran deep in Hamilton.
Howitt says Jonathan’s grandfather George was drawn to the area around what became The Spectator building because there was a “big, big vein of clay” that could be made into bricks.
The brick company evolved into a construction business by 1914 with Herbert Frid (1888-1966) as president. The firm had a yard on Frid, but the main office was on Rebecca Street.
Frid Construction later relocated to the Hamilton Harbour Commissioners building on James Street North. After Herbert died in 1966, his son Ken became president. When Ken died, the company was sold and eventually dissolved.
Buildings the family business worked on include Memorial School, the T. Eaton Company, the Mount Hamilton Hospital (now part of the Juravinski Hospital), Burlington’s Joseph Brant Hospital and Westinghouse in Hamilton. In 1954, Herbert was one of the founders of the Hamilton Community Foundation, and the family is known for local philanthropy especially with the Royal Botanical Gardens.
Longtime Spectator columnist Stan McNeill once wrote, “the success of the Frid Construction Company Ltd. can be attributed to the twin factors of perseverance and motivation … the naming of Frid Street ensures the family’s lasting connection with the city.”
Oh, and by the way, I am no relation to Stan, who retired from The Spectator in the 1980s. Although we did work at the same building on Frid Street.