Yvonne De Carlo

Yvonne De Carlo – Sephora to Lily Munster

Yvonne De Carlo was a Canadian actress that is best known for the unusual television role of Lily Munster in the 1964 runaway TV show “The Munsters.” In this role, she played a mother vampire married to a bumbling Frankenstein with a human niece and a werewolf son. Naturally, they had a live-in vampire grandpa for laughs.

Now I know that this is a movie podcast but there are a few connections that I have to make to close some loops. The werewolf son, Eddie, shows some signs of being part vampire such as sleeping in a drawer, having a widow’s peak, and hanging upside down. He was often seen with his werewolf doll named Woof-Woof, which looks an awful lot like Lon Chaney Jr.‘s character Larry Talbot from The Wolf Man (1941).

Until 1940, Yvonne appeared in three unbilled parts in short films. Finally, she got a part in a feature. Her big break came with Salome Where She Danced (1945). One of her small but important roles was as a woman secretary married to a GI in war-torn Italy. In this film, Brute Force (1947), she was responsible for the GIs downfall and imprisonment. She played a feisty housekeeper in McLintock! (1963). She had a pretty good run of films through the ’50s when she got the role of Sephora, Moses’ wife in the Ten Commandments (1956).

This led to another role of note, that of Amantha Starr in Band of Angels (1957) where she was a mixed-race adult who was sold into slavery and eventually purchased by Hamish Bond – played by none other than Clark Gable. This film also stars Sidney Poitier, who’s gonna be the subject of a future podcast.