Podcast Flashback: Humbert Allen Astredo

We're preparing to put all 94 episodes of The Collinsport Historical Society podcast into the vaults later this week. It's a bittersweet moment in the website's history, but one that will make more sense once the new series is released into the wild. If you don't already have our previous episodes, you should download them as soon as possible. You can find the entire archive online at iTunes ... and pretty much everywhere else podcasts are available.

Here's one of the highlights from the series: In 2014, Patrick McCray scored an incredibly rare interview with actor Humbert Allen Astredo, who entered the world of Dark Shadows with a bang in 1968 as warlock Nicholas Blair. He'd later go on to play the satanic Evan Hanley and Charles Dawson on the show, and had a lengthy career on the stage after the program's cancellation.

Astredo spoke with McCray about using comedy to survive the Korean War, the different perspectives between east coast and west coast acting schools, and how he landed his first role on Dark Shadows. This is very likely the last interview Astredo ever granted; he passed away in 2016 at the age of 86.

"A white knuckled interview," McCray said. "A really nice guy convinced he had to keep an icy exterior. A very complex man. I really worked for the opportunity. Terrifying, and maybe one of the best experiences of my life. I miss him."

You can listen to the interview below.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: April 4

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1968: Episode 469

In the secret room, Vicki recalls the circumstances under which she shot Noah Gifford in 1795.  Vicki, Jeff, and Julia open the coffin, finding it empty.  Barnabas springs up from his hospital bed, mad with the urge for blood.  Lang explains that it is only a relapse, but Barnabas demands more information.  Lang elaborates that the transfusion temporarily arrested his condition, but if Barnabas agrees to his treatments, the cure will be permanent.  Later, Julia visits Lang at the hospital.  He refuses to divulge his plans to Julia, explaining that Barnabas will remain his doctor after he leaves the hospital.  Julia offers a guarantee for Barnabas’ cooperation if Lang will let her participate.  If not, and if she senses danger, she vows to stop Lang.  Clark enters, cutting their meeting short.  Julia leaves and Clark explains that he saw her at Eagle Hill.  Lang is angry because Clark was supposed to go to Stanhope Cemetery, where there is plenty of fresh activity.  Clark wants to quit, but Lang insists that he cooperate or be sent back to the institution for the criminally insane.  Lang knows that Clark and Vicki are attracted to one another, but wants nothing to interfere with his plans.  If Clark defies Lang, the doctor threatens to tell her that Clark is a murderer.

Today, the Dark Shadows actors walked out of the studios to a world where Dr. Martin Luther King was minutes away from assassination.  It would not be until December 21 that astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders successfully broke the bonds of Earth to orbit our moon for the first time in human history.  According to history, one person wrote a letter to NASA in gratitude for that achievement, stating simply, “You saved 1968.”  It was still several months from the murder of Robert Kennedy, but it was very suddenly a world that needed DARK SHADOWS.  And over the next year, it delivered.  Not as a diversion.  Not as an escape. But as a model.

"Maybe we just needed it in the '60s," David Selby told DC Comics back in 2012. "They were shows that allowed you to escape … shows that made life a little easier to cope. I think about New York City at that time and all the things that were going on. The corruption, the racial conflicts, the unrest at Columbia University. There were protests everywhere. Then there was Chicago, and the election in 1968. The assassination of Martin Luther King, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Vietnam was raging. And then you had these shows. I’m sure some sociologist is examining all of this and working it out. But I think those two shows, Batman and Dark Shadows, they fit that expression, 'Whatever gets you through the night.'"

Barnabas, within one year of this episode, will make the most important changes of his life.  He will defy Eric Lang’s directive to murder Jeff Clark. He will destroy Nicholas Blair’s attempts to create a master race. And he will risk everything to venture to 1897 because it is the right thing to do. DARK SHADOWS couldn't save 1968. But it offered a lot more than just a diversion.

It’s also Humbert Allen Astredo’s birthday. And that’s a good thing, too.

Humbert Allen Astredo in FRAGMENTS, 1967

More than a year before joining the cast of DARK SHADOWS, actor Humbert Allen Astredo was sharing the stage in a one-act play called FRAGMENTS with Gene Hackman and James Coco. The production ran for 24 performances between Oct. 2 and Oct. 22 in 1967 and appears to have been a success despite its modest stint.

From what I can tell, Astredo was the top-billed actor in this performance, which also shared a stage with a second play from the same creative team, BASEMENT. (Hackman and Coco appeared in both plays.) Hackman had the louder of the roles, though, according to an Oct. 4, 1967 review in New York's Democrat and Chronicle. If the photos are evidence of anything, it's that Hackman had much more to work with that Astredo, who the newspaper said performed "while arranged supine on a cot so that only his bare soles confront the audience."

FRAGMENTS/BASEMENT has a pretty interesting pedigree. It was written by Marc Merson and Edgar Lansbury, the latter of which is brother of actress Angela Lansbury and the late producer Bruce Lansbury. (Edgar would go on to produce the movie adaption of GODSPELL and the cult classic BLUE SUNSHINE.) Merson was the executive producer of DOC HOLLYWOOD, a movie I've seen more times that I care to admit.

I'm not sure whatever happened to Hackman and Coco. I think one of them was in that moose movie with Ray Ramano.

"My First Vampire," a 1968 interview with Vincent Loscalzo

For about two years, DARK SHADOWS was the hottest program on television … which is no small accomplishment for a show that aired at a time of day when most people were otherwise occupied. Because of this scheduling, soaps have traditionally been a safe place for actors to learn how to work in front of a camera, gain valuable experience and pay their bills. Very few people ever become celebrities while working on a soap, but between 1968 and 1969 almost everybody involved with DARK SHADOWS got their 15 minutes of fame.

Case in point: This 1968 interview with the show's make-up artist, Vincent Loscalzo. Part of being a make-up artist is having your work routinely taken for granted. When you do your job well, nobody should know you've done anything at all ... which makes a make-up artist one of the most valuable people on a set, as well as one of the most invisible.

Below is a syndicated newspaper interview with Loscalzo as it was presented in The Pittsburgh Press Sun. I've seen more truncated versions of the interview, all of which were probably tailored in some way to fit the needs of their readers. This is the longest version I could find and includes a startling revelation: DARK SHADOWS aired at 9 a.m. in this newspaper's market at the time of publication. Also, the apocryphal "Collins House," the original name for Collinwood during the pre-production of the show, was still being bandied about more than two years after its debut.

The feature is titled "Master of Ghouls Gallery" for reasons I don't get. It was accompanied by only one photo of Loscalzo working with actor Jonathan Frid, and that doesn't add up to much of a "gallery." I've included a collection of photos from the same shoot at the bottom of this post to make up (snort) for this oversight.

Master of Ghouls Gallery
Nov. 24, 1968

By EUGENE NEST

They are always there; leading I tormented lives, stalking the gloomy corridors of Collins House—the monsters of "Dark Shadows," ABC-TV's daytime suspense series (9 a.m., Channel 4). Although these ghoulish characters are the invention of imaginative writers, it falls on Vincent Loscalzo, the makeup man, to transfer them from the drawing board to the television screen. Vinnie, 38, is plump, balding, pleas-ant and likes to paint. He looks more like the nice little man who sells balloons to kids in the park than a creator of monsters. His schedule is so busy that instead of going out to lunch, he nibbles cheese and crackers. He keeps his supply of food in the makeup cabinet besides a bag full of bubble gum.

My First Vampire
"Barnabas was my first vampire," said Vinnie. "As the show started getting more eerie I began doing more and more monster makeup." Photographs of the supernatural creatures created by Vinnie are dis-played on the walls of his makeup room. Among these is a sequence showing Jonathan Frid being trans-formed into Barnabas, the 175-year-old vampire.

"The producer tells me what he wants in the way of a particular monster and then I'm on my own. What I usually do first is sketch the creature the way I think it should look," said Vinnie. "In order to create Barnabas I had to do some research on vampires. He wears bangs like the ones worn by men in the 18th Century. His eyes stand out because I've put dark shadows around them. His fangs were made by a dentist in Manhattan, who added to a plaster impression of Frid's teeth. I have Frid's makeup down pat so it only takes me 25 minutes to turn him into Barnabas, the vampire." Not all characters are as simple to make up. One of the most complicated is Cassandra Collins, played by a 20-year-old blonde, Lara Parker. Cassandra is really a 175-year-old witch called Angelique.

Lara Parker in "hag drag," Episode 499, May 23, 1968.

"Cassandra was gorgeous, but the show's resident warlock, Nicholas Blair (Humbert Allen Astredo), cast a spell on her and made her lose her looks because she was disobedient. It all happened gradually. First she aged 25 years, then 40 years and finally 95 years.

"I used special glue and cotton to form all the lines and jowls in the neck, chin and face. Then I covered her face with rubber liquid latex. I put dark makeup around her eyes to make them look sunken and formed all the character lines on her face with flesh-colored makeup. To say the least, Lara was quite shook up when she looked at herself in the mirror." Vinnie has been with the series since it began in June, 1966. Prior to that he did free-lance makeup work for "Confidential Woman,' an ABC-TV weekly series. (Note: I could find no reference to a television show called "Confidential Woman," but there was a short-lived ABC program in 1966 titled "Confidential for Women." It starred Darren McGavin and Jane Wyatt.)

Native New Yorker 
A native New Yorker, one of 11 children of Italian immigrants, Vinnie got into makeup work through acting. "I used to perform in neighborhood theater groups, and also worked as an extra in television programs and a few movies. One day, a girl friend of mine, who was working on a movie, invited me to do her makeup. I accepted and I liked it."

There was a knock on his door and Jonathan Frid entered. "Vinnie, I need some blood on my face," Frid announced. "Someone's supposed to botch me up. It's all a nightmare." Vinnie opened a cabinet, revealing shelves stuffed with an assortment of teeth, wigs, plaster heads, hands and of course, grease paints. He took out a jar of gory liquid and went to work.

Humbert Allen Astredo (1929-2016)

By PATRICK McCRAY

Humbert Allen Astredo appeared in CYRANO on stage, and that play's forceful, biting, and eloquent world seems made for him. Mr. Astredo died on Feb. 19, and his panache is his legacy. When he first appeared on DARK SHADOWS as Nicholas Blair, viewers were treated to a wholly unique figure. He reveled in his mirthfully menacing sense of style and nimble command of the language. Soap operas are the domain of characters who are intentionally slow-witted. It's the only way to stretch out the stories. With the introduction of figures like Nicholas Blair (and Professor Stokes around the same time), DARK SHADOWS would defy this cliche. Nicholas was almost always one step ahead, and the piercing sense of awareness mustered by Mr. Astredo gave that total authenticity. His singular contribution to the show was his ability to believably fuse HP Lovecraft with Noel Coward. Critics of the show inevitably missed the kind of elan that he brought to it, but without that sense of wit, DARK SHADOWS is incomplete. In his time, Humbert Allen Astredo was a soldier, comedian, and actor. It took all three to make Nicholas Blair.

Astredo and Elizabeth Taylor in THE LITTLE FOXES, 1981.

Jim Pierson remembers, “After Frid during the portions of the show when Barnabas was behaving badly, I think Humbert had the most commanding presence of the male villains on DS. Of course he was always dapper, and he added a unique style of wicked humor to Nicholas Blair that was so different from anything else on the show.”

As Nicholas Blair in DARK SHADOWS.

In 2014, with more than a little help from the endlessly gracious Lara Parker, the notoriously reclusive Mr. Astredo granted us an interview. It was the DARK SHADOWS equivalent to an audience with J.D. Salinger. He was brighter, sharper, and more intense than I expected. The email correspondence leading up to our talk was extensive. I suspected that DARK SHADOWS was only marginally interesting to him, and so I focused on the craft of acting. The dialogue became as much an interview with me as anything, and it was clear that his time and attention were precious things not to be meted out carelessly.

Was it intimidating? Absolutely, and I would have been a bit disappointed if it hadn't been. This was, after all, Nicholas Blair. Acting was very much behind him. His reasons were private, and I sensed well enough not to question his decision. He was firm in it, but there was plentiful evidence that his love of performance and language was nevertheless alive. He ripped into Shakespeare several times when we spoke, and it was a joy to witness. He claimed that his beloved Kindle often grew unreadable from the spray he projected as he would read aloud. Even if he were his only audience, it was clear that Humbert Allen Astredo never stopped performing.

(Note: Listen to McCray's 2014 interview with Humbert Allen Astredo below.)

Humbert Allen Astredo in THE LITTLE FOXES, 1981

Humbert Allen Astredo and Elizabeth Taylor.

In the past, I’ve had a tendency toward reactionary behavior. I’ve always found it expedient to just say what I think and deal with whatever consequences might follow.  If you’re over the age of 21, you already know how well that attitude works out.

When I got my first “grown up” job as a newspaper writer, my editor cautioned me against this mindset. Journalism is a small field: While honesty is essential, being an asshole is not. The people you worked with yesterday might be the people you’re working with —  or for — tomorrow.

I can’t say I’ve always obeyed the letter of this advice, but I certainly cherish its spirit. I was thinking about those words while browsing through memorabilia for a Broadway production of THE LITTLE FOXES. The Lillian Hellman play was first performed in 1939, but was revived in 1981 as a vehicle for Elizabeth Taylor. It’s a solid cast from top to bottom, one that included Maureen Stapleton, Anthony Zerbe, Dennis Christopher and our own Humbert Allen Astredo. Even though Taylor was already an established movie star, the play was touted as her Broadway debut.

Astredo played a Chicago million named “William Marshall,” a role performed in the 1941 motion picture adaption by Russell Hicks. I only mention this because Hicks appeared in SCARLET STREET a few years later opposite Joan Bennett.  And Bennett played Taylor’s mother in FATHER OF THE BRIDE and its lesser-known sequel, FATHER’S LITTLE DIVIDEND. Meanwhile, Zerbe appeared with Jonathan Frid in a production of “Romeo and Juliet” in 1966, and so on. If journalism is a small world, then the world of working actors must be even smaller.

The 1981 production stemmed from a chance encounter Taylor had with producer Zev Bufman in the audience of a Washington, D.C., play.  During the intermission, he asked her why she’d never been on Broadway. 

“Because I’ve never been asked,” she answered.

It’s likely that Bufman stocked the supporting cast with professional stage actors in anticipation of diva-like behavior from the show's star.

“I was looking forward to her, but I did not expect a certain degree of professionalism from her — not theater professionalism, anyway,” Dennis Christopher told the Chicago Tribune in 2013. “I was wrong. She was shockingly open to every suggestion, never pulled rank, never ran off in a fit, was perfectly willing to run lines, sit on the floor to mark and highlight the script."


The production played eight previews, opening May 7, 1981, at the Martin Beck Theatre for 123 performances.

You can listen to Astredo speak about his acting career in this episode of our podcast.