There were a lot of talented and attractive actresses back in the day and the stunning Yvonne De Carlo was definitely one of them.
She catapulted to fame through starring in the CBS sitcom The Munsters, only for a tragic accident to suddenly halt her career.
The legendary Yvonne De Carlo was a sultry and versatile actress with a movie career spanning over six decades. Born in 1922, she’s definitely one of the most prominent celebrities to come out of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
As a young girl, De Carlo was abandoned by her father. She was raised by her mother in poor circumstances – but she always knew that she wanted to be an actress, and De Carlo wrote her own plays as a 13-year-old. During her time in Hollywood, the blue-eyed brunette proved that she was the real deal – she could do it all. It wasn’t just the fact that her beauty was overwhelming, De Carlo seemed to be a very down-to-earth lady as well.
Her career in movies and television is a testimony to her strength of character and determination. Among many other things, she played Moses’ wife in the epic film The Ten Commandments – though she’s best known for her role on the tv series The Munsters.
No one could have played Lily Munster better than De Carlo – she really nailed the role of a vampire in the monster sitcom. To this day, many of us can still remember the famous line when Lily, the matriarch of the monster family, says, “I’ve never heard of anything so outrageous in all my LIVES!”
The show propelled Yvonne De Carlo towards TV stardom – the role defined her career, and she gained a whole new generation of fans. It could even be said that The Munsters actually renewed De Carlos’s career. She had a good run in Tinseltown even before the show – she was often called the most beautiful girl in the world, and the audience loved her.
But the truth is that De Carlo’s star quality had begun to fade around the time she was cast in the monster sitcom. The Canadian-American actress had turned 42 when she was offered the role of Lily. And no one could have guessed that The Munsters would be hailed as one of the best television series of all time.
“It meant security,” De Carlo later said. “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.”
“But I never estimated it would become this cult thing. It took two hours of makeup to make me seem like that. It ran for two huge seasons, then CBS quarreled with the creators about reruns as we got canceled. A movie in color in 1966 [‘Munster, Go Home!’] showed off everything in reds and greens on my face. Boy, was I ugly.”
After The Munsters, De Carlo continued to appear both in TV series and on stage. As one of the most respected actresses in the business, she had fans in every generation and no problem finding new and exciting projects.
Unfortunately, De Carlo had a pretty tough time of things during the last years of her life. It all goes back to when the actress met stuntman Robert ”Bob” Morgan on set in 1955.
The couple obviously had some chemistry, but Morgan was married at the time and Yvonne didn’t want to take things further. According to herself, she had ”no intention of causing that marriage to break up.”
Her husband lost his leg
When Morgan’s wife died, he and De Carlo met again on the set of The Ten Commandments in Egypt. They fell in love, got married, and had two sons together, Bruce Ross and Michael.
But living with a stuntman and daredevil came with a price. Morgan and De Carlo struggled to make their marriage work, but everything changed when the former was hit by a moving log train while shooting the 1962 movie How the West Was Won.
The accident cost Morgan his leg. He almost died performing the stunt, and the traumatic experience would affect the whole family. After the incident, medical bills piled up and De Carlo worked extremely hard to support her family. Yvonne, who had basically retired from acting by that point, had to go back to work to pay the bills.
“Before the accident, we were on the verge of breaking up, but when they took me to the hospital I just choked up and only one thought filled my mind: I don’t want my husband to die,” she said.
The Hollywood couple stayed together until 1973.
Losing her son
Sadly, De Carlo would once again have to face unimaginable tragedy. In 1997, her son Michael died at age 39. According to his brother, Michael died of brain damage from a stroke.
Her son’s death was a heavy blow for De Carlo. She made her last film in 1995, and after her son’s death never returned to the entertainment industry. She herself suffered a minor stroke in 1998.
According to her other son, Bob Ross, the stroke resulted from the stress and grief De Carlo felt over Michael’s passing.
“It just preyed on her mind to the point that she had a stroke the following year,” James Bawden, a former TV columnist for the Toronto Star, said.
“All she would talk about was her son.”
Yvonne De Carlo cause of death
Yvonne De Carlo passed away in January 2007 at age 84. During the last years of her life, she lived in a semi-retirement home near Solvang, north of Santa Barbara.
Her cause of death was heart failure.
“I think she will best remembered as the definitive Lily Munster. She was the vampire mom to millions of baby boomers. In that sense, she’s iconic,” her longtime friend and television producer Kevin Burns said at the time.
“But it would be a shame if that’s the only way she is remembered. She was also one of the biggest beauty queens of the ’40s and ’50s, one of the most beautiful women in the world. This was one of the great glamour queens of Hollywood, one of the last ones.”
Yvonne De Carlo is just pure legendary! She is what acting is all about and managed to reinvent herself all the time.
No matter her role, she was always on top of her game and portrayed her character in the most elegant and believable fashion. Rest in Peace!
Check Out : ‘The View’ Audience Member Calls Whoopi ‘Old Broad’ During Live Broadcast.
An audience member during a recent episode of the ABC show “The View” called Whoopi Goldberg an “old broad.” It happened on Wednesday’s show when Goldberg and her cohosts took their seats to begin the show and the audience member shouted the words and Goldberg was taken aback.
We’re happy to see ya’ll. Cool, well, go on and have a seat, she said before addressing the heckler.
“Did you just call me an old broad? Yeah?” the 67-year-oId actress said to the heckler.
The camera then showed a woman who was wearing a large fur hat.
“She said, ‘You old broad,’ and I was like, hey, it’s Wednesday, and I am an old broad, and happy about it,” the host said before cohost Sunny Hostin said that being an “old broad” was better than “the alternative.”
The aIternative is not attractive to any of us, the stress said. “We all want to be old broads and old dudes, you know? The show’s cameras continued to show the woman again and again for the entire episode.
Goldberg caused controversy in December after making controversial statements again.
She had to apologize again for the comments she made about the Holocaust. As she was promoting her new movie “Till,” about a young black child who was viciously mur**red by a gang of white men in 1955, she was asked by a reporter about the comments she made on the show.
Earlier this year, Goldberg was suspended from “The View” for claiming the Holocaust was not about race. She apoIogized for the comments but in a new interview with the U.K. paper The Sunday Times, it appears her apology may not have been sincere.
“Remember who they were k!lling first. They were not killing racial; they were k*lling physical. They were k*lling people they considered to be mentally defective. And then they made this decision,” the actress said.
Journalist Janice Turner explained to Goldberg, whose real name is Caryn Elaine Johnson, that there were race laws the Nazis created against Jews and said that “Nazis saw Jews as a race.”
“Yes, but that’s the killer, isn’t it? The oppressor is telling you what you are. Why are you believing them? They’re Nazis. Why believe what they’re saying?” she said.
“It doesn’t change the fact that you could not tell a Jew on a street,” she said. “You could find me. You couIdn’t find them.”
“But you would have thought that I’d taken a big oId stinky dump on the table, butt naked,” she said, in reference to her comments that got her suspended from “The View.”
My best friend said, ‘Not for nothing is there no box on the census for the Jewish race. So that leads me to believe that we’re probably not a race, she said. But on Tuesday, a representative for Goldberg sent a press release that showed the host apologizing for the comments.
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