Robert Quarry has died, at the age of 83. Quarry, who graduated high school at 14 and began a long career acting on the stage after winning a scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse, had his first movie job when he was still a teenager, playing Theresa Wright's boyfriend in Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1943 chiller Shadow of a Doubt. In the end, his part was chopped and he went uncredited in the movie, an omen that his movie career would be a slow starter. Although Quarry began to get steady work on TV in the early fifties, it wouldn't be until 1956, when he played a murder victim in A Kiss Before Dying, that Quarry began getting movie roles that extended beyond uncredited bit roles and that survived the final edits of the pictures in which he appeared. Finally, in 1970, in his mid-forties, Quarry briefly found his niche, as a cult horror star. It was the title role in the low-budget Count Yorga, Vampire that put him over.

Directed and written by Bob Kelljan, the movie was originally planned as a soft-core porn flick (to be called The Loves of Count Iorga, a title that still appears on some of the prints), but the producers decided to try for a straight horror movie after Quarry offered them his services. The film, whose cast includes Michael Murphy and Ed Walsh-- two actors who, coincidentally, would become best known for their later work for Robert Altman--and a slew of unknowns, was notable for its modern Los Angeles setting, which was quite a novelty at the time for a genre where the action usually took place in some back-lot Transylvania or Hammer-Films Bavarian village. Even with the porno angle dropped, the finished film was violent enough to have problems with the MPAA ratings board, which couldn't have done it any harm with its target audience. Quarry would recall that the production, which came in budgeted at about $100,000, was "hard work. We had just four crewmembers -- that's it. They were all happy on plum wine and grass! There was one make-up man and a few guys with little arc lights. You say the film was 'dark and mysterious' -- the film was dark and mysterious because we didn't have enough lights!” (The movie was shot on nights and weekends to accommodate Quarry's schedule after he'd landed a role in the Paul Newman film WUSA.) But it made him, finally, a recognizable name with a hit film, and he and Kelljan would reunite for the 1971 The Return of Count Yorga.

Quarry would play another vampire in 1972's Deathmaster, which he produced, and which extended the idea of a bloodsucker in the modern world by making Quarry's character a charismatic Manson-like figure presiding over a family of hippie victims. By this time, A.I.P., which had distributed the Yorga films, began grooming Quarry to replace the aging Vincent Price as its house horror star. (A.I.P.'s Samuel Z. Arkoff had already asserted itself by insisting that "Count Iorga" be given a more prosaic renaming. Quarry recalled, “Sam said, ‘If it’s I-O-R-G-A, no one will know what it is,’ and he was probably right. But for the next five years of my life, he always called me ‘Count Yorba.’ I thought, ‘This thing made a little money for you – at least get the name right.’ They changed the name for him, but he still couldn’t get it right.”) Quarry appeared as Price's nemesis in Dr. Phibes Rises Again, the 1972 sequel to The Abominable Dr. Phibes, and also co-starred with him in 1974's Madhouse. Unfortunately, by the time that picture was finished, A.I.P. had slowed production and begun veering away from campy horror films with middle-aged hambones ennunciating amid the blood squibs, and both Price and Quarry were left stranded. Quarry's last notable 1970s horror movie was the blaxploitation-flavored Sugar Hill (1974), in which he played a racist gangster besieged by zombies. He continued acting through the 1980s and 1990s, mostly in straight-to-video dreck. But his time in the sun had left him a beloved figure to cultists on the convention circle. "“I enjoyed playing Yorga," he said not too long ago. "The fun of making movies is the fun of getting outside yourself. I had been playing heavies all my life, but they were more real – just with or without a mustache."