Posted 10 years ago
vintagelamp
(1101 items)
This letter was written in 1961 to a relative who was a drama critic for the LA Times. Recently, I was going through some of the old letters and I finally discovered that Vernon J. Parten was the husband of none other than Carroll Borland, the actress who played "Luna" in "Mark Of The Vampire" with Bela Lugosi in 1935. In this letter he is asking for help in finding little theatres for his wife in the Silver Lake area where they have just moved. He speaks of his "actress wife" who used to be at Metro.
I always loved the creepy "Luna" character and heard that she was the character that Morticia Addams from "The Addams Family" was based on. I looked very hard but could find no letters from "Luna"....damn!
The following is her obituary from the LA Times February 12, 1994:
Carroll Borland, who played opposite Bela Lugosi in the 1935 horror film "Mark of the Vampire" wearing a pasty white makeup that many believe was imitated over the years by such characters as Vampira, Elvira and Lily Munster, has died in Arlington, Va.
Charles Heard, her biographer, said Friday that Miss Borland, who left films 50 years ago to become a college professor, was 79 when she died Feb. 3 of pneumonia.
In 1988, when she returned to the public eye after Elvira (actress Cassandra Petersen) was involved in litigation with Vampira (actress Maila Nurma) over the rights to the characterization, Miss Borland recalled the details of her movie persona in a Times interview.
Makeup artist William Tuttle, she remembered, felt that her character (Luna Mora) should complement the appearance of the vampire (Lugosi).
"So I was given a pasty white face--which looked pretty strange when I walked around the lot--with dark, heightened eyes and dark red lips." (In the 1960s, the stark look also was given to Yvonne DeCarlo in the TV sitcom "The Munsters.")
