Damien Thomas, the British actor perhaps best known for his turn as the vampire Count Karnstein opposite Peter Cushing in the Hammer Films horror classic Twins of Evil, has died. He was 83.
Thomas died April 18 at Salisbury Hospice in Wilshire England, and had been battling progressive supranuclear palsy, daughter Phoebe Court-Thomas told The Hollywood Reporter.
In high-profile miniseries, Thomas played the Portuguese priest Father Alvito alongside Richard Chamberlain in 1980’s Shogun at NBC, and he was the unsettling Richard Mason in a 1983 BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre, starring Zelah Clarke and Timothy Dalton.
Thomas also portrayed a ruthless first mate in Roman Polanski’s Pirates (1986), starring Walter Matthau. When the film bombed at the box office, he blamed himself and said the experience shattered his confidence, he recalled in 2013.
However, when he saw the movie again years later, he “realized it wasn’t me at all. Actually, I’m not so awful in it. … the weakness of the film is Walter Matthau! He does [his character, Captain Red] in a Cockney accent, and it’s so labored and so slow. … It drags the film to a pace that you don’t expect in a pirate movie.”
Thomas noted that he was “a raw beginner who had never been inside a film studio” when he was cast as the Count in Twins of Evil (1971), directed by John Hough at Pinewood as the last piece of the so-called “Karnstein Trilogy.”
His character and Cushing’s Gustav Weil battle each other in the movie, which also featured identical twins — and former Playboy Playmates — Madeleine and Mary Collinson in the cast.
He said he played lots of ethnicities, including French, Greek and Italian, during his career.
Born on April 11, 1942 in Ismailia, Egypt, Thomas studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where he won two scholarships and graduated at 25 after being awarded the principal’s medal. He appeared on a 1968 episode of the Hammer anthology TV series Journey to the Unknown (broadcast on ITV in the U.K. and on ABC in the U.S.) and made his big-screen debut in Julius Caesar (1970), starring John Gielgud, Charlton Heston and Jason Robards.
Thomas’ film résumé included Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1972), Tiffany Jones (1973), The Message (1976), Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) — he played Kassim, before the prince is turned into an ape — Never Let Me Go (2010), Kill List (2011) and The Limehouse Golem (2016).
He also stood out in the early 1980s in the BBC miniseries The Talisman and Beau Geste; in the 1985 BBC telefilm Tenko Reunion; and on episodes of The Return of Sherlock Holmes and Poirot.
He is survived by his wife Julia, his children Dom, Maud and Phoebe and his three stepchildren, Kirsty, Hannah and Gabe.
