Juliet Landau is a highly gifted actress who was born of actors Martin Landau and Barbara Bain. I was particularly excited to meet her when she made an appearance at the October 4, 2008 Hollywood Collectors Show in Burbank, mostly because of the role she created one of my all-time favorite modern shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She also reprised the same role throughout the run of its spinoff series Angel.
Portraying the character of Drusilla she portrayed a somewhat-lovable yet horrifyingly insane vampire of unspeakable power. As the story went, the human Drusilla had been tormented by Angel hundreds of years earlier, and then when she had gone completely mad, he turned her into a vampire. Her psychotic tirades as the companion to Brit rocker vampire Spike were one of the highlights of the show that I have come to love.
After seeing the brutal power she possessed on television, it was a little daunting to approach this same girl who was both unmistakably the brutal killer Drusilla and totally beautiful. I was rather surprised that she didn’t have fans swarming all around her with the immense cult popularity of Buffy, but I hardly saw anyone getting her autograph.
She told me that this was her first autograph show and just wanted to see how it went. I picked up the nice photo below for $20 and her ‘handler’ charged me $10 to get a photo with her. Whenever you pay for it, they seem to be nicer and concerned about getting a good photo, so he snapped two, hence the duplicates displayed here.
I told her I had been a huge fan of her father, who had not only starred along with her in the Academy Award winning role of Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood, but had starred in my very favorite film Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest.
She was polite enough but didn’t have a lot to say. I told her that it had been very nice meeting her and then scurried away, checking my neck for teeth marks.
Celebrities of the 2008 Hollywood Collectors Show will continue…
Unfortunately, Juliet seems to have lied to you. She was signing autographs at the Chiller Theatre show in October of 2006.
Peter
May 2nd, 2009
I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt. I may have misunderstood and she may have said that this was her first “Hollywood Collectors Show”. Anything to make her not come after me and kill me.
Brad
May 2nd, 2009
Very, very cool. Drusilla is one of my favorite female characters from the Buffy/Angel-verse. If given the choice I would choose to meet her over Sarah Michelle Gellar.
Natalie
September 28th, 2012