Damien Thomas, who has died aged 83 after suffering from progressive supranuclear palsy, was an actor best remembered for taking the leading role of a wicked count turned into a vampire in Twins of Evil, a 1971 film combining gothic horror, black magic rituals and two Playboy playmates in the title parts.
The movie’s trailer billed him as “Hammer’s new master of the macabre”, alongside Peter Cushing as the witch-hunting Puritan religious sect leader Gustav Weil, whose orphaned nieces, Maria and Frieda, played by the identical twins Mary and Madeleine Collinson, live with him in an Austrian village. “It was quite difficult to tell the twins apart, but I used to pretend I knew which one was which,” Thomas said.
