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She Made it Cool to be Creepy Taking on the role of "The Munsters" goulish housewife, Yvonne De Carlo played it to the hilt and showed us the subtle sexuality of being sinister.  The role of Lilly Munster made her “hot” again, “which I wasn’t for a while,” Yvonne De Carlo said. There’s no question “The Munsters” suburban ghoul wife was hot, but photographs from the 1950’s show how hot De Carlo really was, even without the black-streaked widow’s peak, the swooping dark eyebrows, spider lashes and unrelenting blood-red mouth.
She was said to have a presence—one of those women who could not enter a room without everybody knowing it. This Canadian goddess lent her sultry presence to countless B-movies, opposite leading men like Burt Lancaster in 1949’s Criss Cross, Rock Hudson in 1953’s Sea Devils, and Clark Gable in 1957’s Band of Angels. She supported Chartlton Heston as Moses’ wife in 1956’s The Ten Commandments.
“The Munsters” came along in 1964 as an “Addams Family” clone, and De Carlo, then in her 40’s, was cast to play the wife of a lovable, lumbering Frankenstein monster played by Fred Gwynne. De Carlo intended, from the very beginning, to play it to the hilt and discovered a remarkable talent for comedy. A former chorister as a child in Vancouver and trained in opera, De Carlo possessed a powerful contralto voice and released an album of standards called “Yvonne De Carlo Sings” in 1957. She sang and played the harp on at least one episode of “The Munsters.” From 1967 she became increasively active in musicals, appearing in off-Broadway and Broadway productions. She was honored with two stars on the Hollywood walk of fame, for her contribution to movies and television. She dated Lancaster, Jimmy Stewart and Howard Hughes and married a movie stuntman, Bob Morgan. They raised two sons before divorcing in 1974. In her 1987 autobiography, she listed 22 lovers. Yvonne De Carlo died last week in a nursing home in Woodland Hills, California.
© Tess
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