Message #263867

[Janelle MacDonald]

LOUIS EDMONDS

When he first signed on to play aristocratic Roger Collins, Louis Edmonds couldn't have guessed that his likeness would end up on merchandise such as trading cards.

"You don't mean, like, the baseball playing cards?" said the actor in 1997, when asked about the phenomenon. (Edmonds died in 2001.)

"If I saw them and don't remember them, it's because I saw a lot of them and they began to blur. You just accept that as part of the job. I think it would have been more fun if we had been paid for it. But I remember seeing all of it.

"Just as Jonathan (Frid), with his Barnabas thing — he must have gotten sick of seeing himself."

In "House of Dark Shadows," the 1970 film adaptation of the series, Edmonds got to do something he never did on the TV show: become a vampire.

"Oh, I was getting so bored being straight man during all the fun everybody else was having, turning into a vampire," he said. "I just rode right along with it."