Carroll Borland
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Carroll Borland (February 25, 1914 - February 3, 1994), better known by the stage-spelling Carol Borland, was an American professor, writer, and actor. She is best known for having portrayed Luna Mora, the daughter of Bela Lugosi's character, Count Mora, in Mark of the Vampire, and her articulate commingling of the real-life Lugosi and the Count Dracula character, even though their characters were not really vampires in the film. She was born in San Francisco, California, and many wild rumors spread about her age and prodigy status, including a rumor that she started college at the age of 14. She was a drama student at UC Berkeley at the time she took the role.[1] She had previously appeared in a stage production of Dracula with Lugosi, in a minor role as one of his victims.
She was often known to promulgate legends about her paternalistic relationship with Lugosi; in Richard Bojarski's The Films of Bela Lugosi, she describes his funeral as if she had been there, and claims to have been, though she was not actually in attendance.[2][1]
She retired from acting in 1953, though her other screen appearances were limited to a few contract unbilled cameo roles until Fred Olen Ray cast her as professors in his films Scalps (1983) and Bio-Hazard (1985).
Her novel, Countess Dracula, was published by Magicimage Filmbooks in March 1994, one month subsequent to her death from pneumonia, probably due to the enormous cult following she attained form Mark of the Vampire. Her role had only one line at the end of the film, and had only approximately ten minutes of screen time in a film that runs only one hour in its theatrical (and only surviving) cut.
[edit] References
- ^ Bojarski, Richard. The Films of Bela Lugosi. Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1980. Introduction by Carol Borland [sic]. 115.
- ^ Lennig, Arthur. The Immortal Count: The Life and Films of Bela Lugosi, University Press of Kentucky. 2003. p. 449.
