10 January 2007
Actress Yvonne De Carlo Dies at 84
Actress Yvonne De Carlo, who played two very famous but disparate wives -- to Charlton Heston in movie epic The Ten Commandments and Fred Gwynne in the horror-spoof sitcom The Munsters -- died Monday in Los Angeles of natural causes; she was 84. Born Margaret Yvonne Middleton in Vancouver, Canada, the actress first traveled to Hollywood with her mother at the age of 15, but returned to Canada after finding little success, even though she was named "Miss Venice Beach" in 1938. Upon her return in 1940 at age 18, she found minor success with chorus girl roles and uncredited bit parts, finally securing her first notable role as Princess Wah-Tah in the western The Deerslayer. As a starlet for Universal, she toiled in numerous unmemorable roles before scoring the lead in the box office success Salome Where She Danced (1945), which led to starring roles in movies such as Slave Girl, Casbah, and River Lady. She played a femme fatale alongside Burt Lancaster in the noir classic Criss Cross, the Princess Scheherazade in The Desert Hawk, and the lead opposite a young Rock Hudson in Scarlet Angel. Her two most famous film roles came in the late '50s, when she played wife Sephora to Charlton Heston's Moses in The Ten Commandments, and the female lead opposite Clark Gable in Raoul Walsh's Band of Angels (which also featured the young Sidney Poitier).
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