Carroll Borland

Who was Carroll Borland?

Carroll Borland, better known by the stage-spelling Carol Borland, was an American professor, writer, and actresses. She is best known for having portrayed Luna Mora, the daughter of Bela Lugosi's character, Count Mora, in Mark of the Vampire, and her articulate commingling of the real-life Lugosi and the Count Dracula character, even though their characters were not really vampires in the film. She was born in San Francisco, California. She was a drama student at UC Berkeley at the time she took the role. She had previously appeared in a stage production of Dracula with Lugosi, in a minor role as one of his victims.

She was often known to promulgate legends about her paternalistic relationship with Lugosi; in Richard Bojarski's The Films of Bela Lugosi, she describes his funeral as if she had been there, and claims to have been, though she was not actually in attendance.

She retired from acting in 1953, though her other screen appearances were limited to a short film in 1933 and an unbilled appearance in the 1936 serial Flash Gordon until Fred Olen Ray cast her in his films Scalps and Bio-Hazard.

Her novel, Countess Dracula, was published by Magicimage Filmbooks in March 1994, one month after her death from pneumonia.