RIP Yvonne De Carlo

Unfortunately remembered most for her role as Lily Munster in The Munsters, one of Hollywood's great beauty queens, Yvonne de Carlo, died on Monday. She was 82.

De Carlo, whose shapely figure helped launch her career in B-movie desert adventures and Westerns, rose to more important roles in the 1950s. Later, she had a key role in a landmark Broadway musical, Stephen Sondheim's "Follies."

But for TV viewers, she will always be known as Lily Munster in the 1964-1966 slapstick horror-movie spoof "The Munsters." The series (the name allegedly derived from "fun-monsters") offered a gallery of Universal Pictures grotesques, including Dracula and Frankenstein's monster, in a cobwebbed gothic setting.

Lily, vampire-like in a black gown, presided over the faux scary household and was a rock for her gentle but often bumbling husband, Herman, played by 6-foot-5-inch character actor Fred Gwynne (decked out as the Frankenstein monster).

Not that The Munsters doesn't have its own schlocky allure, but it's sad that De Carlo is remembered almost solely for a crappy 60's television series. Remembering her only as the paste-white corpse bride of Hermann Munster, it's just how sexy she was underneath the pancake make-up and in her prime. Better to remember her from the still to the right than as what she'd eventually become: a beautiful corpse.

Yvonne De Carlo, 'Munsters' star, dead [CNN}