Margaret Yvonne Middleton (September 1, 1922 – January 8, 2007), known professionally as Yvonne De Carlo, was a Canadian-American actress, dancer and singer. She became a Hollywood film star and sex symbol in the 1940s and 1950s, made several musical recordings, and later acted on television and stage.
De Carlo was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and was enrolled in a local dance school by her mother when she was three. By the early 1940s, she and her mother had moved to Los Angeles, where De Carlo entered beauty contests and worked as a dancer in nightclubs. In 1942, she signed a three-year contract with Paramount Pictures, where she got uncredited bit parts in important films. Her first lead was for producer E.B. Derr in the 1943 James Fenimore Cooper adventure Deerslayer.
She obtained her breakthrough role in Salome, Where She Danced (1945), a Universal Pictures release produced by Walter Wanger, who described her as "the most beautiful girl in the world." The film's publicity and success turned her into a star, and she signed a five-year contract with Universal. Universal starred her in its lavish Technicolor productions, such as Frontier Gal (1945), Song of Scheherazade (1947), and Slave Girl (1947). Cameramen voted her "Queen of Technicolor" three years in a row. Tired of being typecast as exotic women, she made her first serious dramatic performances in two film noirs, Brute Force (1947) and Criss Cross (1949).
The first Canadian film star to visit Israel, De Carlo received further recognition as an actress for her leading performances in the British comedies Hotel Sahara (1951), The Captain's Paradise (1953), and Happy Ever After (1954). Her career reached its peak when eminent producer-director Cecil B. DeMille cast her as Moses' Midianite wife, Sephora, in his biblical epic The Ten Commandments (1956). For this role, she won a Laurel Award for Topliner Supporting Actress. Her success continued with other notable starring roles in Flame of the Islands (1956), Death of a Scoundrel (1956), Raw Edge (1956), Band of Angels (1957), and The Sword and the Cross (1958), in which she portrayed Mary Magdalene.
She starred in the CBS sitcom The Munsters (1964–1966), playing Herman Munster's glamorous ghoulish wife, Lily, a role she reprised in the feature film Munster, Go Home! (1966) and the TV film The Munsters' Revenge (1981). In 1971, she played Carlotta Campion and introduced the popular song "I'm Still Here" in the Broadway production of the Stephen Sondheim musical Follies. Yvonne, her best-selling autobiography, was published in 1987. A stroke survivor, De Carlo died of heart failure in 2007. She was awarded two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to motion pictures and television.
De Carlo was born Margaret Yvonne Middleton on September 1, 1922, at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Her nickname was "Peggy" because she was named after the silent film star Baby Peggy. Her mother, Marie De Carlo, was born in France to a Sicilian father and a Scottish mother. Marie, a "wayward and rebellious" teenager, aspired to become a dancer and worked as a milliner's apprentice until she met Peggy's father, William Shelto Middleton. Middleton was a salesman born in New Zealand to English parents and had "piercing eyes of pale blue, and a wealth of straight black hair."
Marie and William married in Alberta, where they lived for a couple of months before returning to Vancouver. They moved in with Marie's parents, but the marriage was troubled. Peggy had only two memories of her father: climbing up to his knee and crawling toward his feet. By the time Peggy was three, William was involved in various swindles and fled Canada aboard a schooner, promising to send for his wife and child. Marie and Peggy never heard from him again; rumors said that he remarried twice and had more children, worked as an actor in silent films, or died aboard a ship. Peggy later wrote, "My own assumption is that he died before he had the chance to discover that his Baby Peggy had become a Hollywood actress, or I think he would have tried to contact me." After William's departure, Marie left her parents' home and found work in a shop.
Marie and Peggy lived in a succession of apartments in Vancouver, including one with no furniture or stove. They periodically returned to the De Carlo home, "a huge white frame house", at 1728 Comox Street in Vancouver's West End. Marie's parents, Michele "Papa" De Carlo and Margaret Purvis De Carlo, were religious, attended church regularly, and held services in their parlor. Michele, a native of Messina, had met Margaret in Nice, France. They married in 1897, had four children, and settled in Canada.
De Carlo attended Lord Roberts Elementary School, a block from her grandparents' home. She originally wanted to be a writer. She was seven when a school assignment, a poem she wrote titled "A Little Boy," was entered in a contest run by the Vancouver Sun. She won and received a prize of $5, which according to De Carlo, meant as much to her at that time as if she had won the Nobel Peace Prize. She also wrote short plays, which she usually staged in her grandparents' house, and even adapted Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol for a neighborhood performance.
Marie wanted her daughter to have a career in show business and made sure Peggy received singing and dancing lessons. Peggy joined the choir of St. Paul's Anglican Church to strengthen her voice. When she was ten (or three, according to a 1982 interview), her mother enrolled her in the June Roper School of the Dance in Vancouver. In May 1939, a Variety news item listed Yvonne de Carlo as one of the performers at the opening of Hy Singer's Palomar ballroom (also known as Palomar Supper Club) in Vancouver.
1940–1942: Beginnings in Hollywood
De Carlo and her mother made several trips to Los Angeles. In 1940, she won second place in the Miss Venice beauty contest, and placed fifth in that year's Miss California competition (and can be seen in that pageant at 0:36 of the British Pathé film "A Matter of Figures"). At the Miss Venice contest, she was noticed by a booking agent who told her to audition for an opening in the chorus line at the Earl Carroll Theatre on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.
De Carlo and her mother arrived at Earl Carroll's for the audition, but after learning that Carroll would have to examine her "upper assets" before hiring her, De Carlo and her mother searched for work at another popular Hollywood nightclub, the Florentine Gardens. They met the proprietor, Nils Granlund, and he introduced De Carlo to the audience before she tap danced to "Tea for Two". Granlund then asked, "Well, folks ... is she in or out?" The audience responded with "a rousing round of applause, with whistles and cheers", and De Carlo got the job. She started in the back of the chorus line, but after months of practice and hard work, Granlund featured her in a "King Kong number." In it, she danced, and cast off several chiffon veils before being carried away by a gorilla. She was given more solo routines.
She had been dancing at the Florentine Gardens only a few months when she was arrested by immigration officials and deported to Canada in late 1940. In January 1941, Granlund sent a telegram to immigration officials pledging his sponsorship of De Carlo in the US, and affirmed his offer of steady employment, both requirements to reenter the country.
In May 1941, she appeared in a revue, Hollywood Revels, at the Orpheum Theatre. A critic from the Los Angeles Times who reviewed it said the "dancing of Yvonne de Carlo is especially notable." She also made her debut on network radio with Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen, who were performing extracts from a series based on their Flagg-Quirt performances.
De Carlo wanted to act. At the encouragement of her friend Artie Shaw, who offered to pay her wages for a month, she quit the Florentine Gardens and hired talent agent Jack Pomeroy. Pomeroy got De Carlo an uncredited role as a bathing beauty in a Columbia Pictures B film, Harvard, Here I Come (1941). She had one line ("Nowadays a girl must show a front") in a scene with the film's star, ex-boxer Maxie Rosenbloom. Her salary was $25 and her work got her into the Screen Actors Guild. While at Columbia she was featured in a two-reel collegiate comedy, The Kink of the Campus (1941). She also starred in The Lamp of Memory (1942), a three-minute musical film designed to be shown in coin-operated "Soundies" movie jukeboxes.