Lara Parker was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and grew up in Memphis.
She was named Mary Lamar Rickey and was always called Lamar by her
family. Lamar is a family name, that of her great, great grandfather,
L.Q.C. Lamar, who was a revered Southern statesman and a supreme court
justice after the Civil War.
Lara attended Central High
School and won a scholarship to Vassar College where she began a major
in Philosophy which she completed at Southwestern at Memphis (now called
Rhodes College), receiving her B.A. She attended graduate school at the
University of Iowa and completed all course work on a Masters in Speech
and Drama.
The summer she was writing her thesis, she
acted at the Millbrook Playhouse in Loch Haven, Pennsylvania, where she
played five leads in six weeks. She decided to try her luck in New York
City, and the second week she was there she was cast as Angelique on
Dark Shadows, a show which has become a cult classic. While she was in New York, she appeared in a Broadway play,
Woman Is My Idea, and two off-Broadway productions –
Lulu and
A Gun Play.
Lara moved to Los Angeles in 1972 and began working in primetime television. She guest starred in numerous shows including
Hawaii 5-0, Doctor's Hospital, Switch, Kung Fu, The Incredible Hulk, Remington Steele and
Galactica 1980. She also appeared in several movies of the week and pilots, such as
The Lazarus Syndrome, People Like Us and
Desperate Voyage, along with the soap opera
Capitol. She appeared in the Equity Waver production of Pinter's
The Lover.
Lara
is married to Jim Hawkins, a contractor and builder, and she has three
children: Rick, Andy, and Caiti. Rick Parker is a successful record
producer, Andy is a contractor and Caiti Hawkins is a set designer and stylist for videos and commercials.
Lara
turned her creative energies toward writing ten about years ago,
and now has written three novels, a collection of short stories, several
screenplays, and has contributed to several non-fiction books. In 1998,
Lara's first novel was published by HarperCollins.
Dark Shadows: Angelique's Descent fleshed
out details about the early life of her most famous character and was a
bestseller, reprinted three times. In the summer of 2006, Tor Books
released the sequel,
The Salem Branch, helping expand the legacy of this TV classic. A third
Dark Shadows novel,
Full Moon Rising is due out later in 2012. To read more about Lara's writing, click here.
In
2004, Lara earned her Master's Degree in Creative Writing, and she now
teaches at a college in Los Angeles. In 2006, she was invited to New
York University, where she did a two-day workshop titled
Heart of Horror, discussing the process of horror writing.
In the Summer of 2011, Lara and three of her
Dark Shadows co-stars – Jonathan Frid, David Selby and Kathryn Leigh Scott – travelled to England to film cameo appearances in the new
Dark Shadows feature film from director Tim Burton.
Lara and her husband live in a house they designed and built on a mountaintop in the Santa Monica mountains.
