Carroll Borland

Carroll Borland (February 25, 1914 – February 3, 1994), better known by the stage-spelling Carol Borland, was an American professor, writer, and actress. She is best known for having portrayed Luna, the daughter of Bela Lugosi's character, Count Mora, in Mark of the Vampire, and for creating the iconic look of the female vampire with her waist-length dark hair and Adrian-designed shroud in this film. The visual designs of both the character of Lily Munster in the television series The Munsters and Vampira played by Maila Nurmi were based on her striking appearance. She was accused of wearing the "wiggiest wig in Hollywood," but the waist-length hair was her own. Her character does not speak through much of the film, and walks in a trance-like state. She was born in San Francisco, California. She was a drama student at UC Berkeley at the time she took the role. She had previously appeared in a stage production of Dracula with Lugosi, in a minor role as one of his victims. Borland got the attention of Lugosi—and a part in the play—by writing to him and suggesting that Dracula did not die at the end of the novel, but rather turned to dust just as the sun was setting. However, she was known to exaggerate the closeness of Lugosi's paternal relationship to her; 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. Borland retired from acting in 1953, though her other screen appearances were limited to a short film in 1933 and an unbilled appearance in the 1936 serial Flash Gordon, until Fred Olen Ray cast her in his films Scalps (1983) and Biohazard (1985). Her novel, Countess Dracula, was published by Magicimage Filmbooks in March 1994, one month after her death from pneumonia.

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