Yvonne De Carlo dies at 84

De Carlo died of natural causes Monday at the Motion Picture & Television facility in suburban Los Angeles, longtime friend and television producer Kevin Burns said Wednesday.
De Carlo, whose shapely figure helped launch her career in B-movie desert adventures and Westerns, rose to more important roles in the 1950s. Later, she had a key role in a landmark Broadway musical, Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies.”

Lily, vampire-like in a black gown, presided over the faux scary household and was a rock for her gentle but often bumbling husband, Herman, played by 6-foot-5-inch character actor Fred Gwynne (decked out as the Frankenstein monster).
While it lasted only two years, the series had a long life in syndication and resulted in two feature movies, “Munster Go Home!” (1966) and “The Munsters’ Revenge.” (1981, for TV).
At the series’ end, De Carlo commented: “It meant security. It gave me a new, young audience I wouldn’t have had otherwise. It made me ‘hot’ again, which I wasn’t for a while.” (Click here for the rest of the article)

By the time she celebrated her 19th birthday, she had begun landing small film roles, first at Columbia Studios and then Paramount. She appeared in about 20 films between 1941 and 1944, but only in small roles and bit parts.

DeCarlo's success in Black Bart helped change her image, so much so that she soon became typecast in westerns. Throughout the 1950s, she made scores of westerns, including Tomahawk (1951), Silver City (1951), and Shotgun (1955). And she even appeared in the pilot episode of the TV series Bonanza in 1959. Probably her best remembered role in the 1950s was in The Ten Commandments (1956) as Sephora. In addition to her acting career, DeCarlo released several albums in the 1950s, highlighting her pleasant singing voice which she had previously showcased in her 1940s musicals.
DeCarlo married actor and stuntman Robert Morgan in 1955. Morgan appeared with DeCarlo in Death of a Scoundrel (1956), and he also acted in at least one episode of The Munsters. With the birth of her two sons in the late 1950s, she cooled her acting career, taking on only a few guest roles on television shows such as Bonanza. By 1963, she was once again active in Hollywood, making a couple of films before being cast as 'Lily Munster' in the CBS-TV series The Munsters.


Mark Harvey
A Munsters fan