page_title: Yvonne De Carlo
section_title: Later career (1974–1995)
hierarchical_section_title: Yvonne De Carlo / Later career / Later career (1974–1995)
caption_attribution_description: Photo of actress Yvonne De Carlo
context_page_description: Yvonne De Carlo was a Canadian-American actress, dancer, and singer. A brunette with blue-grey eyes, she became an internationally famous Hollywood film star in the 1940s and 1950s, made several recordings, and later acted on television and stage.
  Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, De Carlo was raised in the home of her Presbyterian maternal grandparents. Her mother enrolled her in a local dance school when she was three. By the early 1940s, she and her mother had moved to Los Angeles, where De Carlo participated in beauty contests and worked as a dancer in nightclubs.
  She began working in motion pictures in 1941, in short subjects. She sang "The Lamp of Memory" in a three-minute Soundies musical, and worked briefly at Columbia Pictures. In 1942, she signed a three-year contract with Paramount Pictures, where she was given uncredited bit parts in important films and was intended to replace Dorothy Lamour. Her first lead was for independent producer E.B. Derr in the James Fenimore Cooper adventure Deerslayer.
context_section_description: De Carlo appeared in The Girl on the Late, Late Show (1974), The Mark of Zorro (1974), Arizona Slim (1974), The Intruder (1975), Blazing Stewardesses (1975), It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time (1975), Black Fire (1975), and La casa de las sombras (1976).
  She continued to appear on stage, notably in Dames at Sea, Barefoot in the Park and The Sound of Music.
  She was seen on Satan's Cheerleaders (1977), Nocturna (1979), Guyana: Cult of the Damned (1979), Fuego negro (1979), The Silent Scream (1979) and The Man with Bogart's Face  (1980). She guest starred on shows like Fantasy Island.
  De Carlo was in The Munsters' Revenge (1981), then Liar's Moon (1982), Play Dead (1982), Vultures (1984), Flesh and Bullets (1985), and A Masterpiece of Murder (1986) (with Bob Hope). She was in a revival of The Munsters.
  De Carlo's later films included American Gothic (1988), for which she won the Best Actress Award from International Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Show (Fantafestival); Cellar Dweller (1988); and Mirror Mirror (1990). She had a supporting role as the title character's Aunt Rosa in the Sylvester Stallone comedy Oscar (1991). Aunt Rosa is present when Oscar's father, played by Kirk Douglas, extracts "a deathbed promise" from his son. Of her role, De Carlo said, "Mine is a small part—but funny."
  She was in The Naked Truth (1992), Seasons of the Heart (1993), and "Death of Some Salesmen" in Tales from the Crypt (1993). She had a small cameo role in Here Come the Munsters, a 1995 television film remake of The Munsters. De Carlo, along with Al Lewis, Pat Priest, and Butch Patrick, did not have to wear costumes "because the Munsters have several lives."
  Her final performance was as Norma, "an eccentric Norma Desmond lookalike", in the 1995 television film The Barefoot Executive, a Disney Channel remake of the 1971 film of the same title. Norma, a former stand-in for film actors, "monkey-sits" the title character, a chimpanzee named Archie who is able to predict top-rated television series. "She has these outrageous costumes—six of them—and it's just a small part", De Carlo told Los Angeles Times. "But I like to do small things now."
  In 2007, her son Bruce revealed that, before her death, she played supporting roles in two independent films that have yet to be released.
caption: De Carlo at the National Film Society convention, May 1979
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