Yvonne De Carlo

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BIRTHDAY

September 01, 1922

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

DIED

January 08, 2007

RECENT CREDITS

Nocturna (FILM) Jan. 1, 2004

Timbuktu (FILM) Jan. 1, 2003

The Road to Morocco (FILM) Jan. 1, 2000

Oscar (FILM) Apr. 26, 1991

American Gothic (FILM) Jun. 10, 1988

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BIOGRAPHY

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Although she was one of Hollywood's most devastatingly beautiful B-movie sexpots in the '40s and '50s, De Carlo will forever be remembered as the morbid matriarch on the goofy sitcom The Munsters. Of course, when this Canada native took the part, she had no idea Lily Munster would become her signature role. But while the series died after just two seasons, it lived forever via reruns and earned her generations of fans. Yet De Carlo had a career both before and after her years at 1313 Mockingbird Lane. Raised by a single mother who enrolled her in dance lessons as a child, De Carlo was still a teen when she began landing bit movie parts, finally winning her first lead in the unremarkable 1945 Western Salome, Where She Danced, in which she played — as she often would — an exotic seductress. While she occasionally appeared in more prestigious projects — she was Moses' wife in The Ten Commandments and a fabulous femme fatale in the film noir Criss Cross — she was usually called upon to do little more than look gorgeous and act campy. The highlight of her post-Munsters work came in 1971 when she portrayed an aging bombshell in Stephen Sondheim's Follies, in which she defiantly belted out the anthem "I'm Still Here." The title nicely summed up her career, which, though not always distinguished (particularly toward the end, when the newly overweight star popped up in a string of grade-Z horror flicks such as American Gothic), did span an impressive half a century. She had been retired from showbiz for over a decade when she died of heart failure in 2007.

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