Yvonne De Carlo

Yvonne De Carlo
Paramount Studios

Stars

Yvonne De Carlo
Film: South side of the 6100 block of Hollywood Boulevard
Yvonne De Carlo
TV: North side of the 6700 block of Hollywood Boulevard
Actress
Born Margaret Yvonne Middleton on Sept. 1, 1922 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Died Jan. 8, 2007 in Motion Picture and Television Country House, CA

Yvonne De Carlo was a sultry actress who played Moses' wife in the 1956 epic "The Ten Commandments" but achieved wider fame as the vampirish wife and mother in "The Munsters" on television.

On "The Munsters" she was still allowed to be siren-like as Lily, the wife of the bumbling Herman Munster, played by Fred Gwynne, in the horror-spoof that originally aired from 1964 to 1966 on CBS.

She based her performance of Lily on Zasu Pitts, the silent-screen actress who had a flair for comedy, said De Carlo's son, Bruce R. Morgan.

Midway through the run of "The Munsters," De Carlo took delivery on a Jaguar that she had custom-fitted with coffin rails on top, spider-web hubcaps and a Dracula crest on the side.

She thought it would be "fun" to drive around, she told The Times in 1965.

By the time De Carlo became a Munster, she had already been cast in about 100 feature films, many of them "sword and sandal" movies that exploited her looks and figure in harem dress. She also often appeared in westerns.

Her breakthrough came in the title role in "Salome, Where She Danced," a 1945 film about an exotic dancer trying to become a Mata Hari-type spy. Critics savaged the film but the box-office hit made her a star, according to "Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide."

She followed it with the routine western "Frontier Gal" (1945) and "Song of Scheherazade" (1947), in which she played a dancing girl who supposedly inspired the composer Rimsky-Korsakov.

On stage, she sang an operatic role in "Die Fledermaus" in 1951 at the Hollywood Bowl. Twenty years later, she appeared in the Stephen Sondheim musical "Follies" on Broadway, singing the now-classic standard "I'm Still Here."

With her pin-up looks came a parade of paramours. Her 1987 book "Yvonne: An Autobiography" lists 22 lovers, including Howard Hughes, Burt Lancaster, Billy Wilder, Aly Khan and an Iranian prince, the Associated Press reported.

In 1981, she left Los Angeles and moved to the hills above Solvang in Santa Barbara County.

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