Lara Parker, the Witch Angelique on ‘Darkish Shadows,’ Dies at 84

Lara Parker, who because the vengeful witch Angelique Bouchard spent centuries entangled in a love-hate relationship with Jonathan Frid’s Barnabas Collins on the gothic ABC cleaning soap opera Darkish Shadows, has died. She was 84.

Parker died Thursday in her sleep at her dwelling in Topanga Canyon in Los Angeles, her daughter, Caitlin, advised The Hollywood Reporter.

On the massive display, Parker stood out as a prostitute whose consumer has a coronary heart assault in John G. Avildsen’s Save the Tiger (1973), starring Jack Lemmon in an Oscar-winning flip, and she or he performed the spouse of Peter Fonda‘s character within the satanic horror movie Race With the Satan (1975), additionally that includes Warren Oates and Loretta Swit.

Mere days after arriving in New York in 1967, the green-eyed Parker auditioned for Darkish Shadows creator Dan Curtis, who forged her as Angelique in a narrative arc that may element the origin of the tortured vampire Barnabas.

A soldier and the son of a transport magnate, Barnabas in 1795 seduced and deserted a servant woman from Martinique not realizing she was a witch. That woman was Angelique. “He simply dallied along with her after which dismissed her, and she or he was to not be dismissed,” Parker stated in an undated interview for a Darkish Shadows dwelling video launch.

An enraged Angelique would rattling Barnabas to enteral life as a vampire, kicking off a battle between the 2 that may proceed via totally different time intervals.

“I performed her as any person who was far more of a tragic determine, who was desperately, desperately in love,” Parker stated in 2016. “And her coronary heart was damaged. That’s far more sympathetic than simply being a imply outdated witch. I felt that her acts had been acts of desperation, not acts of evil.”

Although Angelique and others she would inhabit would perish, she would stay with the daytime serial via its April 1971 demise.

“Dan Curtis [would call Parker and say], ‘You’ve been nice, kiddo, however we’re going to kill your character. Thanks quite a bit for every little thing,” she recalled in 2020. “After all I used to be very unhappy, however about two months later they known as me and stated that they wished me again.

“We had been form of the primary group, and the followers appeared to look at it extra when Angelique and Barnabas had been preventing it out. That appeared to be the preferred a part of the present, so [Curtis] introduced me again many, many instances.”

Parker was born Mary Lamar Rickey on Oct. 27, 1938, in Knoxville, Tennessee. Her father, Albert, was an lawyer, and her mom, Ann, was lively in civic teams.

She graduated from Central Excessive College in Memphis and attended Vassar — she roomed with Jane Fonda there — and Rhodes Faculty in Memphis, the place at 19 she served as Wink Martindale’s assistant on his WHBQ-TV present, Dance Occasion. She then earned a grasp’s diploma from the College of Iowa.

After a busy summer season appearing on the Millbrook Playhouse in Pennsylvania, Parker left her husband and two youngsters in Wisconsin for a spell to see if she might discover work as an actor in New York. “By the point the kids had been 6 and seven years outdated,” she stated in a 1972 interview for Mid-South journal, “I knew that I simply couldn’t sit there and have a look at these fields for the remainder of my life.”

In New York for her second-ever skilled audition, she was forged as Angelique. “I believe my solely response to it was paralyzed concern,” she stated.

Darkish Shadows, which had debuted in June 1966, acquired a viewership jolt when Frid was launched as Barnabas in April 1967. Parker arrived within the fictional city of Collinsport, Maine, seven months later.

“We realized [the show] was in style,” she stated. “In every single place we went [the cast was] acknowledged. There was an enormous crowd outdoors the [Manhattan] studio after we completed within the afternoon of autograph seekers. Individuals would present up, the identical individuals each single day, day after day. They worshipped a few of us and would stroll us to the subway.

“I can bear in mind standing on the subway when faculty bought out and seeing 200 or 300 youngsters all ready to take the prepare. They’d see me and begin screaming and run to the opposite finish of the platform! They had been so terrified as a result of I used to be so evil.”

In the meantime, feminists admired Parker due to her character’s energy, she stated. “She was coming in at first of the ladies’s motion and she or he was very impartial,” Parker famous. “They type of missed the truth that she was obsessed along with her love for Barnabas and that was destroying her.”

On Fb, her Darkish Shadows co-star Kathryn Leigh Scott wrote Monday that Parker’s demise left her “heartbroken, as all of us are who knew and cherished her. She graced our lives along with her magnificence and expertise, and we’re all richer for having had her in our lives.”