Interview: Kathryn Leigh Scott A vintage Dark Shadows Journal interview from 1996 Were you always interested in acting? Id been interested in acting ever since I was a little girl. I wrote my second play whilst I was in junior high, about George and Martha Washington, and Ive been interested in acting ever since. I did a lot of acting in high school. I went to college and was a theatre major and did three plays. I later applied to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where I was accepted as a full time student. How did you land a role on Dark Shadows? When I first graduated from the academy, I did summer stock again, although professionally, through Equity. Then while I was there, my agent called to tell me about this new soap opera [Dark Shadows]. So I auditioned. The first role I was considered for was Victoria Winters. Then a month or so later I was called in again to read for the part of Maggie and I got it! Maggie Evans seemed a bit more urban in the early episodes… Yes, in the very beginning, Maggie Evans was seen as the waitress in the diner, who wore a blonde wig and was a very tough-talking, gum-snapping kind of gal! [laughs] After Alexandra Moltke (Victoria Winters) left the show, my character changed drastically. I was no longer the waitress. I suddenly had a different accent and a whole lot more education. Do you think that change suited you as an actress? It wasnt bad that she went in the direction she did and as far as the ensemble playing was concerned, there had to be an ingenue and she was in the victim role. So, as they had been done unto Vicki, things were done unto Maggie! It was the nature of this role, the protagonist role. Maybe if the show had gone on longer, Maggie would have developed more into her own woman and wouldnt have been so girlish, but, in actual fact, I was quite girlish when I played her. There was a lot of me in Maggie Evans. When you play a continuous role on television, you quickly realise that it is a very intimate medium. Soon, the writers on the show began to use me as a model for the character. And so that person starts to become more and more of yourself. A major turning point for Maggie seemed to be the death of her father, Sam Evans… I remember the show where my father was gravely ill. I had to prepare for that one a great deal as an actress. After that, Maggie was effectively an orphan, completely on her own and without any sort of protection. In fact, I think there was then more significant bonding with the family up at Collinwood. The reason they got rid of the father [latterly played by David Ford] was simply that he was having an extraordinarily difficult time learning his lines. One would never realise that there are these practical concerns. The first father [Mark Allen] was gotten rid of for the very same reason. The second one developed this problem too. I mean he was a lovely actor but [laughs]... You may remember that, for a while, they made him blind. They made him blind so that he could read the teleprompter! Thats why even his ghost has dark glasses! You were the first Dark Shadows actor to play a dual role, as the ghost of Josette. How did that happen? I stopped by the studio one day to collect some scripts and I wasnt working that day. I walked in and saw the producer, Bob Costello, filming an insert for the following days show. Theyd dressed up this dress dummy in bits of lace and put a green light and a fan on her to give her this ethereal sort of look. Her face was made up as if she had fallen off a cliff and was bloodied. I asked what they were doing and remarked that it didnt look very convincing. So I said to Bob Costello, Would you like me to put this stuff on? At least I could flutter my arms or something. And he jumped at it and said, By all means. So they did and matted my hair down with talcum powder and baby oil and put the green light on me. And as I raised my arms, the fan made my eyes water, so it looked like I had tears rolling down my face - it was very effective. So then, I guess, because I had played the ghost of Josette, when they decided that she should appear as real, I was in place to play her. By then, the idea of doing a costume drama and to play a role like Josette was just heaven. For the 1795 storyline, did the doomed nature of Josette affect your approach? It was so funny the way that things worked out on a daily basis. One never made that connection. One knew that there was tragedy, that something was happening, but the story of how it was happening hadnt been written yet. And this was simply a ghost coming back. In the early days, we knew only that this lovely young woman was coming from Martinique, with her maid and we had no idea. Its just the joys of acting moment-to-moment. By this time, Dark Shadows was firmly a supernatural show - what was the casts reaction to that change? We didnt like it. We thought we were doing a romance and all of a sudden, we got into the supernatural and thought, Oh God, were going to be doing Halloween every day! When we realised what an unbelievable success we had on our hands, it just changed everything and we welcomed it. To do something like that is quite remarkable. Actors drool to do something that appealing: to play all those characters and to scream and shout! So it was all very new to us and the thing that really helped was that we had fabulous directors at that point [Lela Swift and John Sedwick]. They were really wonderful directors whom we trusted implicitly. So, when they gave us a direction to go in, we absolutely followed it. I had a lot of respect for [their input] so I just felt right with it. Do you think that the special demands of the show demanded good camaraderie between the actors? We had new characters entering all the time. From the moment that Lara Parker walked on the set, we knew that it was gonna work. I think that is one of the reasons why Dark Shadows has been such an enduring success: the casting was just a wonderful blend of talents, faces and voices. It just worked! During 1897, you played two characters - Rachel Drummond and Lady Kitty Hampshire… Yes... Things got very muddled there for a while and I think that Dan Curtis realised that he had caused his actors to double up... and so there we were, doubling up! They just asked me one day if I could do an English accent [for Kitty]. I made a stab at it and, never having been to England, came up with what I did! What are your memories of House of Dark Shadows, the first Dark Shadows movie? It was wonderful to do, except that it was a little bit frightening because I had never been in front of a movie camera before, and there is a difference. We were all used to doing something live and so on the first day, when we were doing several takes, I became quite depressed. I thought I was doing something wrong. I couldnt imagine why we had to do it again. Id remembered most of my lines and moved at the right times! What was your verdict on the finished film? I think that I could have been much better, and if Id had a better sense of myself as an actress, I think that I would have been a whole lot better. It was very difficult. We were literally working day and night and travelling back and forth between upper state New York and Manhattan to do the show and to do the film. Jonathan Frid has often said he felt that it was too violent… I think a number of us felt that way. But then, doing a [television] horror show is one thing - doing it for a film audience thats used to a tremendous amount of violence is quite another. I think that Dan Curtis realised that he had to pull out all the stops. However, I thought that given the circumstances we had worked under, it worked out very well. It certainly made a huge amount of money for MGM. I think it saved them from bankruptcy that year, though I think they lost the battle the following year! In 1970, you left the show to move to Paris and Maggie was carted off to the asylum… [laughs] For the final time! I dont think that Dan Curtis was very happy about my leaving, and so rather than killing me off, as he had so many times before, he sent me to a mental institution. It was his little joke! Looking back, do you remember any special episodes? There were a few that I remember, but we were working at such a fast pace that for the most part, everything simply blended together. The ones that really stick in my mind were usually the ones that required special effects. They were usually the scariest and could be very difficult, because we had very little time to rehearse our scenes. I remember the first episode, because it was the beginning, for all of us. I especially remember the one where Josette jumped from Widows Hill, simply because that was such an extraordinary show to do. There was another where hands came up from a grave and above all, I remember the episode where I was in the casket, because it was a quite horrible experience. Onto another cult classic… What was it like working on Star Trek: The Next Generation? I was very glad to have done it because I had been talking about Dark Shadows and Star Trek in the same breath for years. My feeling is that there is a tremendous similarity between the two, certainly within fandom. Both Dan Curtis and Gene Roddenberry were geniuses of a sort in taking these universal tales - one going forward in time in a science fiction sense, and one going back in time, in a Gothic way. Although they had different approaches, they both ended up producing morality tales. I was so pleased with the show I did [Who Watches the Watchers?] because if anything proves my point, my show fell into that morality tale category. It was wonderful. You later founded Pomegranate Press, which has published several Dark Shadows books. How did that come about? It began because two of my dear friends had just died, Grayson Hall [Julia Hoffman] and Joel Crothers [Joe Haskell]. I had just returned to the States from England, where I had been going back and forth and had done a couple of jobs, and I was thinking of them, though I was also aware that Dark Shadows was approaching its twentieth anniversary. And there were all these people out there, who knew me from Dark Shadows, asking about the show. So I sat down, with a yellow legal tablet and a pencil and I just kept writing - I didnt stop. This was before any of these books were really done and I published it myself because there really was no market for it then. Having published that first book, My Scrapbook Memories of Dark Shadows, which did so well, I was encouraged to do a lot of other books, and they did well too. Did you ever see the 1991 Dark Shadows revival? I never saw it - I was actually in London at the time. Of course the show premiered in the States during the Gulf War and therefore a great many people didnt see it, which I think hastened its demise. So by the time I got back to the States, it simply wasnt on, though I have seen parts of it since. Do you think a revival of the show could work? I think that there is a market for it, probably more so than a couple of years ago. I think it might do fine. Summing up, how does Dark Shadows fit into your career? Very specifically, Dark Shadows was my first job, and no more than that. It didnt cause me to get other work. It didnt give me a celebrity name as such, because I was simply too young and it didnt open any doors whatsoever. In fact, most of us were in danger of becoming typecast. However, the benefit that Dark Shadows gave me was a wonderful training period. After school, to be able to go into a show like that and exercise was simply fantastic.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 00:11:22 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015