Special Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) in The X-Files Pilot (1993).
Rain appeals to my melancholic inclination, and makes me think of many things I love: seeking refuge from the storm in The Old Dark House; sheltering at the Rashōmon city gate to stay dry; the debate on the Declaration of Independence in 1776; seeking refuge from a different storm in The Rocky Horror Picture Show; Roy Batty’s last words in Blade Runner; Billy Kinetta’s revelation in “Paladin of the Last Hour”; Claudia comforting Lisa in the aptly titled “A Rainy Night”; the smell of a Labrador having shaken the rain off her fur; Rob McKenna in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish; the pelting of Collinwood (and/or the Old House) in Dark Shadows; Mulder and Scully at any given moment in the first five years of The X-Files; Charles and Tommy’s talk in Four Weddings and a Funeral; Andy Dufresne’s freedom in The Shawshank Redemption; my first two rain-soaked short stories, “After the Fall” and “Last Night”; Billy Shipton’s last hour in “Blink”; and others that aren’t coming to mind.
Charles (Hugh Grant) and Tom (James Fleet) in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994).
I used to love the rain, and it saddened me that I lived in place where it doesn’t happen as frequently as I’d like. But now, when it does happen—as it’s happening right now—I worry about something completely out of my hands, a vestigial obligation of friendship that will probably haunt me for the rest of my life. The once-pleasant melancholy inclines to inescapable despondency, and I wonder if a favorite has slipped away…
Amanda Fitton (?) and Albert Campion (Peter Davison) in Campion: “Sweet Danger” (1990).
On 15 November 1990, I fell in love.
Mystery! debuted the second season of Campion (1989–90) with an adaptation of Margery Allingham’s Sweet Danger (1933), the story that introduced Amanda Fitton, a character that would have recurred, had a third season been forthcoming. In the television version, she was played by a wide-eyed, red-headed English actress who delivered great swaths of exposition in rapid-fire R.P. that left the viewer breathless when she was done. Her energy was irrepressible, her enthusiasm uncontainable, and her depths of feeling—in the slow moments, when she was watching Campion and we were watching her—were unplumbable.
When Diana Rigg came on at the end of the second hour and detailed Campion’s matrimonial future with Miss Fitton in Allingham’s books, I understood completely, because I was besotted with her as well, but…
Amanda Fitton (?) in Campion’s “Sweet Danger”.
I’d not been home, KUHT had been slightly off-schedule, and the credits ran after my tape stopped recording. I had no idea who’d played Miss Fitton. I just enjoyed the rest of the season, re-watched my VHS tape of “Sweet Danger,” and hoped season three would bring more of Amanda.
On 8 February 1991, I fell in love for the second time.
A séance had sent governess Victoria Winters back to Eighteenth Century Collinsport. Taken in by the ancestors of the family she served in 1990, she began to uncover the origins of the Dark Shadows (1991) haunting the Collins family, a curse wrought by a jealous servant girl, Angelique Bouchard, in love with her mistress’s fiancé.
Barnabas Collins (Ben Cross) discovers Angelique Bouchard (Lysette Anthony) has bewitched his brother and fiancée in Dark Shadows (1991).
Having appeared a few episodes earlier in spectral form, Angelique scared the hell out of me, but in the flesh I couldn’t understand why Barnabas Collins would favor Josette du Pres over her maid, who was easily her better in every category short of station and—arguably—sanity. (Sure…Angelique nearly wiped out an entire family, framed an innocent woman for witchcraft, and turned the man she loved into an undying monster, but she had valid reasons. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)
Angelique was played by a smoldering blonde French actor who terrified and excited me in equal measure. I knew her name because a) it was in the front credits, and b) I was home to tape them all, and the season finale set her up for some serious year-two evil.
I re-watched the tapes incessantly, reading about plots from the 1966–71 incarnation of Dark Shadows, and wondering which Angelique-centric stories would be updated for the 1990s… but the Gulf War tanked the ratings and I’m pretty sure we knew Dark Shadows (1991) had a stake in its heart by May.
And that’s when Mystery! started its summer reruns.
Somewhere in the summer of 1991, thirteen-year-old Jason Davis realized that Amanda Fitton and Angelique Bouchard had been played by Lysette Anthony, and for something like six to eight months, I hadn’t realized that the two most beguiling actresses on television were the same woman. If there’s a better complement for her work, I can’t think of it.
Lysette Anthony as Amanda Fitton in Campion’s “Sweet Danger” and as Angelique Bouchard in Dark Shadows (1991).
(While I’m not fooled by Clark Kent’s glasses, I’ve failed to identify close relatives who’ve had a haircut or gone gray since our last encounter, so I blame it entirely on the hair.)
(I dated two women because they reminded me of Anthony’s Amanda Fitton performance, and I married one of them.)
