JONATHAN FRID was a Canadian actor, born on this date (d: 2012) best known for his role as vampire Barnabas Collins on the gothic television soap opera Dark Shadows. The introduction in 1967 of Frid’s reluctant, guilt-ridden vampire caused the floundering daytime drama to soar to 20 million daily viewers. His watershed portrayal has been cited as a key influence on contemporary genre film and television series such as Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries.

After receiving high praise in his second year at Yale for his portrayal of Tullus Aufidius in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Frid was invited to join the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut. For two consecutive summer seasons, under the direction of John Houseman, Frid performed with such distinguished actors as Alfred Drake, Earle Hyman, Fritz Weaver, Sada Thompson, and Katharine Hepburn.

After earning his MFA in 1957, Frid joined Hepburn and other members of the American Shakespeare Festival on a national tour of Much Ado About Nothing. When the tour concluded Frid moved to New York City, where he made his off-Broadway debut in The Golem directed by Robert Kalfin. In 1961 he began using the stage name Jonathan Frid, first seen in the program for The Moon in The Yellow River. He continued to appear in many off-Broadway productions and in regional theatres across the United States. Among them were Front Street Theater in Memphis; Pittsburgh Playhouse; and the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. 

His most celebrated Shakespearean performance was the title role of Richard III at the 1965 Summer Festival of Professional Theatre at Pennsylvania State University.

Frid made his Broadway debut as an understudy, and appeared, in the 1964 play Roar Like a Dove, directed by Cyril Ritchard and starring Betsy Palmer.

How closeted was Jonathan Frid? While he never publicly came out, he did, during the many years he lived in New York City, patronize several gay bars. He allowed himself to be photographed with Louis Edmonds, his openly gay co-star, on a gay beach in New York. 

Frid died in May 2012 at the age of 87. He was a gentleman to the end, always conducting himself with the utmost dignity and class. To gay kids who watched him get out of that coffin and search for his long dead love, he remains a pivotal icon. Barnabas Collins, the lonely vampire who felt cursed by the undead state he was forced to live in, gave his young gay viewers, many of whom were forced by society to live equally lonely lives, a hero they could believe in.