Yvonne Craig Was Not Yvonne DeCarlo

There seems to be a little confusion out there in Internet-land this morning: there are millions of searches for Yvonne DeCarlo, doubtless being conducted by people who think she’s Yvonne Craig, whose death was announced on Wednesday.

Yvonne Craig portrayed Batgirl on the Batman TV series, a character who’d existed in the deep mists of Batman comics mythology but who was brought to the fore by TV producer William Dozier as the daughter of police Commissioner Gordon in Batman’s third season. That version of Batgirl, in keeping with an example of early corporate synergy, was (re-)introduced in the comics world in Detective Comics #359, drawn by the incomparable Carmine Infantino.

Yvonne DeCarlo, my young pop-culture students, played Lily Munster in The Munsters (1964-66), but that was her rare involvement with other-worldly characters. DeCarlo had a busy film career, with roles in movies ranging from the spectacular film noir Criss Cross (1949) and the more colorfully spectacular Biblical epic The Ten Commandments, in which Cecil B. DeMille cast her as Sephora, wife of Moses. DeCarlo died in 2007.

File this post under “Know Your Pop-Culture Yvonnes.”