Lamar Hawkins 1938-2023
Longtime Topanga resident Lamar Hawkins passed away at home on October 12 of cancer.
Her family is holding a memorial and celebration of her life for an afternoon of storytelling and song in our beloved Topanga Canyon on Sunday, Nov. 12, 1 to 5 p.m., at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum. Light refreshments will be served.
Lamar’s husband, Jim, and their daughter, Caitlin Hawkins will host the event and extend this invitation to Topanga friends who knew her in life.
“We are looking forward to seeing all of your beautiful faces this weekend and sharing our love for Lamar,” Caitlin wrote. The event will start to gather at 1 p.m, with the memorial ceremony beginning promptly at 2 p.m.
It’s worth noting that this is an outdoor theater space and though we have been having great weather lately, please bring something warm to wear in case it gets chilly in the early evening. Please contact Caiti with questions at caitihawkins@gmail.com.
Lamar will be remembered by devoted fans worldwide who knew her as Lara Parker, the actress who created the role of Angelique in the groundbreaking gothic vampire TV soap, Dark Shadows. (June 27, 1966 to April 2, 1971).
To her family and those who knew her in the ordinary stream of life, she will be remembered as a blessing in their lives and, perhaps, carry forward whatever wisdom, love, laughter and simple insights she brought to their friendships.
EXTRA (extratv.com) was one of the first online publications to announce Lamar’s passing and quoted her close friend and Dark Shadows co-star, Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played Josette. Excerpts follow.
“I’m heartbroken,” Scott wrote. “She graced our lives with her beauty and talent and we are all richer for having had her in our lives. Family meant everything to her.”
They met on the set of Dark Shadows but “we knew each other as friends and confidantes,” Scott wrote. “For more than 50 years, our lives were intertwined through our mutual love of literature, writing and acting. We could not have been more unalike, and therein lay the magic of our enduring friendship.”
Parker was born Mary Lamar Rickey in Knoxville, TN, on October 27, 1938 and raised in Memphis. She made her TV debut on Dark Shadows, about the lives of the rich Collins clan. She reprised her role in the second feature film based on the series, Night of Dark Shadows, (1971). She worked on Broadway in 1968’s Woman is My Idea, and worked with Robert De Niro in the early Brian De Palma film, Hi, Mom, (1970). She had a prominent role in the film, Save the Tiger (1973), with Jack Lemmon, and appeared in Race with the Devil (1975) with Peter Fonda.
Later in life, Parker, a regular at autograph shows, returned to Angelique, publishing four “Dark Shadows” novels (1998-2016).
Parker is survived by her second husband, Jim Hawkins, to whom she had been wed for more than 40 years, their daughter, and two sons from her first marriage to artist Tom Parker. (extratv.com)