Anne Rice Vampire Character Info(some)
15 years, 5 months & 11 days ago
16th Jul 2009 15:12 Name: Armand
Date of Birth: Unknown, circa 1400s
Place of Birth: Kiev, Russia
Date Brought into Darkness: circa 1400s at the age of 17
Place Brought into Darkness: Venice, Italy
Maker: Marius
Chronicled Appearances: Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, Queen of the Damned, Memnoch the Devil, The Vampire Armand
Fledglings: Daniel Malloy
Description: Armand is first introduced when Louis encounters him in the streets of Paris. Armand has large brown eyes and the face of an angel. His manner is calm and unhurried, hypnotic to Louis in its centeredness and sense of agelessness. He is facil and detached, with a body at his command and eyes that seem to see and uphold only his own thoughts. Louis understands that Armand attempts to present the maximum truth, while simultaneously being deceptive. As a leader of the coven that operates the Theatre of the Vampires, he is an actor, appearing both innocent and cruel, simple and complex
Name: Daniel Malloy
Date of Birth: 1955
Place of Birth: Unknown
Date Brought into Darkness: 1985 at the age of 30
Place Brought into Darkness: On Armand's private jet traveling from Chicago to San Francisco.
Maker: Armand
Chronicled Appearances: Interview with the Vampire, Queen of the Damned, mentioned in The Vampire Armand
Fledglings: None
Description: The reporter from a San Francisco radio station who records Louis' confession about being a vampire and publishes it under the pseudonym Anne Rice, as Interview with the Vampire. Tall and slender, with violet eyes and a beautiful face, Daniel is about 20 years old when he meets Louis, for he is 32 at the time of Lestat's rock concert. After Louis' tale, Daniel chides Louis for not seeing what a wonderful gift it is to be a vampire. Louis bites him and leaves him in the room unconscious, but when Daniel wakes, he listens to his tapes for clues about Lestat's location, then heads to New Orleans. Louis' bite has left him with obsessive dreams of immortality, which attracts Armand.
The ten-year relationship between Armand and Daniel is the epitomy of the fluctuations of dominance and submission. Each struggles for both surrender and control. Armand likes to be dominated and wants a teacher, although he is in fact a powerful vampire who can torment and even kill Daniel at will. When Daniel feels strong, he walks away from the relationship, but inevitably he disintegrates and surrenders to Armand, who is always ready to come and get him. They play a game, for each has something the other wants. Daniel describes himself as a mortal slave, the "Devil's Minion," but Armand is as much a slave to him. When it becomes clear that Daniel is dying, Armand cannot face existance without him and, against his better judgement, gives in to Daniel's demand and makes him a vampire.*
Name: Lestat de Lioncourt
Date of Birth: 1760
Date Brought into Darkness: Winter 1780 at the age of 20
Place Brought into Darkness: Paris, France
Maker: the rogue vampire Magnus
Chronicled Appearances: Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, Queen of the Damned, Tale of the Body Thief, Memnoch the Devil, The Vampire Armand
Fledglings: Nicholas de Lenfent, Gabrielle du Lioncourt,Louis de Pointe du Lac, Claudia, David Talbot
Name: Louis de Pointe du Lac
Date of Birth: 1766
Place of Birth: New Orleans, Louisiana
Date Brought into Darkness: 1791 at the age of 25
Place Brought into Darkness: New Orleans, Louisiana
Maker: Lestat de Lioncourt
Chronicled Appearances: Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, Queen of the Damned, Tale of the Body Thief, Memnoch the Devil, mentioned in The Vampire Armand
Fledglings: Madeline, aided with Claudia's making
Description: Louis is twenty-five years old when he becomes a vampire in 1791. A plantation owner in New Orleans, he owned seven other pieces of Louisiana property. He had made himself vulnerable to the vampire Lestat while he was deep in grief over the death of his brother Paul. Louis felt responsible because his brother had taken a fatal fall after Louis had refused his request to sell the plantation and use the money for religious work. Lestat had fallen in love with Louis' air of despair and offered immortality which Louis accepted, although at first he had begged merely to be killed.
Although Louis soon despises Lestat and mourns his decision to become a vampire, he finds a new purpose when he helps Lestat to make Claudia, a 5-year-old child into a vampire. She comes to mean everything to him, and he attempts to keep her a child, despite the evidence that inside her tiny body she has matured into a woman. After attempting to kill Lestat, Louis accompanies Claudia to Europe and when she is destroyed, his world changes dramatically. Louis clings to Claudia's memory and resists the approach of another vampire, Armand, who is strongly attracted to him and who manipulated Claudia's destruction in order to obtain Louis' exclusive companionship. By the end of his story, Louis seems cynical; he is unable to appreciate what a gift he has in immortality.
When he is later reunited with Lestat, they are as lovers rejoined. Nevertheless, Louis never quite gets over his horror at being a vampire and when Lestat comes to him in a mortal form in Tale of the Body Thief and asks for his help in becoming a vampire again, Louis refuses. He will not willingly pass on the Dark Gift to anybody every again. Louis is also one of the surviving vampires in Queen of the Damned; Akasha spared him because Lestat loves him. He moves through the novel passively, noticed by the others but saying little, although he does brave Akasha's anger by pointing out that she has no right to intervene in the human world. She responds that he is actually the most predatory of all the immortals.
After Akasha's demise, Louis goes in search of Claudia. He follows Jesse's lead that Claudia's ghost has appeared in New Orleans, and he makes his permanent home there, living in a shack behind a large but empty Victorian house. There he reads by candlelight and is seemingly unaware of all the broken windows. Lestat angrily torches this shack after Louis refuses to help him become a vampire again. Once Lestat gets his body back, however, he confronts Louis, then upon forgiving him, invites Louis to live with him again in the refurbished townhouse. Louis accepts.
Name: Marius
Date of Birth: Roman Empire after 49 B.C.E.
Place of Birth: The Roman Gallic City of Massilia
Date Brought into Darkness: Roman Empire after 49 B.C.E. at the age of 40, on the night of the great Feast of Samhain
Place Brought into Darkness: In the woods outside of his home city
Maker: God of the Grove
Chronicled Appearances: The Vampire Lestat, Queen of the Damned, Tale of the Body Thief, The Vampire Armand, Pandora
Fledglings: Pandora, Armand, Benji, and Sybelle
Description: With blue eyes and white-blond hair, Marius wears red velvet, no matter what the era. Marius seems to depict a pure image of human love. Gentle, vital, and noble, he eminates a god-like power, although he is more human than most vampires. Marius does have the ability to perform supernatural feats like levitation and mental telepathy, but he prefers to do things the human way. To him, human gestures are more elegant and require less energy. "There is wisdom in the flesh," he claims (The Vampire Lestat, p. 379). His goal is to not transcend human emotions but, rather, to refine and understand them. He also seems connected to everything around him - thus being the antithesis of Armand, who is connected to nothing. Marius is the keeper of Those Who Must Be Kept until Akasha is awakened in 1985.
Lestat first hears of Marius when Armand explains how he became a vampire. When Armand first knew him in the 15th century, Marius had been a Venecian nobleman and artist. He chose to work among mortals, have mortal apprentices, and make religious art. It was Marius who bought Armand from a brothel, and fell in love with him. He then painted The Temptation of Amadeo in an attempt to capture on campus Armand's qualities forever, and he made Armand a vampire so that he could join with another kindred soul. Marius desired their bond to be permanent, but their happiness became short-lived when, only 6 months later, Santino's coven put a torch to Marius and captured Armand. Marius managed to escape to his secret shrine in the mountains of northern Italy, where he healed himself by drinking the healing blood of Those Who Must Be Kept. He did not see Armand again until 1985 in Sonoma, although he had been aware that Armand was suffering through three centuries of loneliness.*
Name: Santino
Date of Birth: unknown
Place of Birth: Italy
Date Brought into Darkness: mid-1300s, during the reign of the Black Death
Place Brought into Darkness: Italy
Maker: Unknown
Chronicled Appearances: The Vampire Lestat, Queen of the Damned, The Vampire Armand
Fledglings: None.
Description: A black-haired Italian vampire, he is the leader of the satanic coven in Rome when Marius lived in Venice. He was born to darkness in the mid-1300s during the reign of the Black Death, and his vision for vampires is that they be a "vexation without explanation" (The Vampire Lestat, p. 301), which causes mortals to doubt God. Santino helps to form the Great Laws and see that they are carried out in all covens. He leads the attack on what they view as the heretic Marius, whom they are trying to destroy because he lives among mortals. Although the attack fails, it drives Marius from Venice and results in Armand's apprenticeship into the coven. Later Armand hears that Santino went mad and abandoned the coven, which subsequently dissolved into chaos. When Lestat and Gabrielle meet the members of another Roman coven, there is no evidence of Santino.
Santino makes more appearances in Queen of the Damned accompanying Pandora to rescue Marius, the vampire he had once tried to destroy.* He is also seen in flashback as Jesse recall his presence on a visit to her 'Aunt' Maharet's home where she also met Mael.