Film fans were sad to hear of the recent passing of actress Cindy Morgan. Known primarily for her roles in Caddyshack and Tron, a recent conversation with Fango found the actress reflecting fondly on her equally memorable turn as a blonde bloodsucker in the beloved cult TV classic, The Midnight Hour.
“How often does one get the opportunity to wear fangs and be a creature of the night?” the actress asked.
Before diving into her vampiric role, she touches on Tron (“You know how I pulled off that spandex costume? No lunch!”) and Caddyshack, where she had to keep up with comedians Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, and Rodney Dangerfield as the promiscuous golf groupie, Lacey Underall.
“Holding my own against them was intimidating! I did a lot of improv on Caddyshack, because you were following these brilliant comic actors, and you had to stay on your toes to stay in the scene!
“Luckily, I studied with a brilliant teacher Harvey Lembeck. I was in his class with Robin Williams, John Ritter, and Penny Marshall. He taught us to ‘Stop going for the joke — you’re the straight (man) in this scene!’ His theory was if you set up the joke, you get just as much credit for the joke!”
Born and raised in Chicago, Morgan paid her dues as a TV weather girl and radio DJ.
“I’m Polish! My real name is Cindy Cichorski. I always liked ‘Morgan Le Fay’ from King Arthur, so I made resumes for Cindy Cichorski and Cindy Morgan. I sent them to numerous radio stations, and only ‘Cindy Morgan’ got hired!”
When she tried her hand at horror, “I did the TV movie The Midnight Hour, which a lot of cable channels run every Halloween. It was a lot of fun — a TV movie with a great script! Our director, Jack Bender, did a great job — and then he went on to a big career, doing The Sopranos, Lost and Game of Thrones (as well as Child’s Play 3).”
“The movie was set in this little town that’s suddenly full of demons, witches, and zombies. I played Miss Jensen, a substitute teacher who was actually a vampire! It was almost like Buffy the Vampire Slayer before Buffy!
“Playing a vampire was a new experience — Making it was a lot of fun, with me running around with a mouth full of fangs, wanting to feed on my own students!
“The cast included Shari Belafonte, Peter DeLuise, and Levar Burton as my class. Macaulay Culkin makes his screen debut in it as a trick-or-treater,” Morgan shares. “There’s a great scene at a school dance, where I turn around and try to bite one of my students, which was funny.”
Morgan dug being a vampire.
“Wearing the fangs was just so cool! They were these little prosthetic things that you could just slip on. I try to bite one kid and end up getting pushed — I die when I’m impaled on a bush! That was the last shot of the night.
“They wrapped, everybody started racing home and left me hanging on the damn bush! I had to climb off it myself! I then found out the makeup people had already been wrapped, so there was no one to remove my makeup! I drove home at 5 am with all of my vampire makeup still on!”
She also appeared in the horror/sci-fi film Amanda and the Alien. “I only did a cameo in that, because I was also the associate producer for that and four other films.” Being an associate producer “confirmed everything I ever thought — everybody just got here and is making it up as they go along!”
