Yvonne de Carlo (1922-2007)

[Fatalitas]

Premier film qui me vient à l'esprit : Criss Cross (Pour toi j'ai tué) avec B.Lancaster (et Tony Curtis en figurant).

pareil, ainsi que La Belle espionne de Walsh

R.I.P

[Ann Harding]

Deux autres nécro qui couvrent bien toute sa carrière du Guardian et The Independent (GB):

For a few years from 1942, the Latin-American Maria Montez reigned supreme as a vamp at Universal Studios in Technicolored romantic exotica, often referred to as "tits and sandal" epics. Then just as Montez, whose acting ability was as minimal as the costumes she wore, was losing her appeal, along came Yvonne De Carlo, who has died aged 84, as voluptuous but much more talented, to take her place.
The film that launched De Carlo into stardom was Salome, Where She Danced (1945), an unintentionally ridiculous saga of a Mata-Hari-type Viennese dancer who has an opera house built for her and a town named after her in the American west. De Carlo's foreign-sounding name seemed just right for an actor who went on to appear in such films as Song of Sheherazade, Slave Girl, Casbah and The Desert Hawk. Peggy Middleton, her real name, would never have done.

In fact, the Canadian-born Middleton took her screen name from her mother's maiden name. When Peggy was three, her father abandoned the family, forcing her mother, then only 17, to become a waitress. But her mother recognised show-business potential in her daughter and enrolled her in a dance and drama school in Vancouver. In 1940, aged 18, Peggy went to Hollywood to try her luck in the movies, while dancing in chorus lines at night.
Finally, as Yvonne De Carlo, she got a brief part as a bathing beauty in Harvard, Here I Come (1942). Because of her tawny looks, there followed small roles as a harem girl in Road to Morocco (1942), a Spanish girl in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), a Native American in The Deerslayer (1943), an Arab dancer in Kismet (1944) and a Javanese dancer in The Story of Dr Wassell (1944).

The stardom that came with Salome, Where She Danced, was consolidated in the same year in Frontier Gal, a comedy western in which De Carlo was a seductive saloon owner manipulating bandit Rod Cameron into a shotgun wedding. From then on, the two main strands in her career were horse operas and camel operas.

In the outrageously kitsch biopic Song of Sheherazade (1947), De Carlo played a (fictional) Moroccan nightclub dancer named Cara de Talavera inspiring mariner Rimsky-Korsakov (Jean-Pierre Aumont) to compose. "Me, oh, my, sounds like the buzzing of a bee," she says of one of his most famous numbers, before turning up in St Petersburg as the prima ballerina in his new ballet. That same year, she also played a mysterious dancer in Slave Girl, but was upstaged by a talking camel.

Luckily, she had a chance to show that she could really act in Jules Dassin's jail drama Brute Force (1947), as a wife whose husband is taking a murder rap for her; and as a scheming woman in Robert Siodmak's film noir Criss Cross (1949), in which she is caught between her nasty current husband, Dan Duryea, and her ex, Burt Lancaster.

But she mainly alternated between slinky femme fatales, such as Lola Montez in Black Bart (1948) or Sheherazade in The Desert Hawk (1950), and gun-toting or sword-flashing gals in Calamity Jane and Sam Bass (1949) and Buccaneer's Girl (1950). Through the 1950s she continued to shine as saloon girls and cabaret singers in movies that were mostly the purest hokum.

She also showed her comedic gift in two British-made films: in Hotel Sahara (1951) as Peter Ustinov's faithless fiancee, and in The Captain's Paradise (1953), in which bigamist Alec Guinness plied his way between her tempestuous Spanish character and the frightfully English Celia Johnson.

After playing Sephora, the wife of Moses (Charlton Heston) in Cecil B DeMille's mammoth The Ten Commandments (1956), and a beautiful mulatto opposite Clark Gable in Band of Angels (1957), De Carlo found a new career in television. She appeared in Bonanza and The Virginian, before landing the role that would introduce her to a new generation, and for which she is mostly known today.

In The Munsters (1964-66), De Carlo transformed herself from a vamp into a vampire as Lily Munster, loving wife and mother of benign monster Herman (Fred Gwynne) and wolf-boy Eddie (Butch Patrick). With her silver-streaked hair - and not too much macabre makeup to detract from her attractiveness - she played the Transylvanian-born Lily as if she were an ordinary American housewife, doing the dusting even while putting the vacuum cleaner into reverse and spreading dust everywhere.

The same cast starred to lesser effect in a feature film version, Munster, Go Home (1966), in which the loveable ghouls inherit an English mansion, and they were later reunited on TV in 1981 for The Munsters' Revenge.

Like many an ageing sex goddess, De Carlo found work on the big screen in schlock movies such as Russ Meyer's The Seven Minutes (1971), in which she played a senator who writes a pornographic novel under a pseudonym. She also had the best lines as a diabolically possessed woman in Satan's Cheerleaders (1977): "Kill! mutilate! destroy!" she cries, before being ripped apart by dogs.

Her career reached a high point in 1971 when she created the role of Carlotta Campion in Stephen Sondheim's Follies on Broadway, stopping the show with I'm Still Here. "I've run the gamut from A to Z, three cheers and dammit, c'est la vie. I got through all of last year, and I'm still here," she sang, with special appeal to those who remembered her Hollywood glory days.

In 1955, De Carlo married Hollywood stuntman Robert Morgan, who later lost a leg and was blinded in one eye while filming How the West Was Won (1963). The couple had two sons, before they divorced in the mid-1970s. The younger son survives her, the elder having died in 1977.

Yvonne De Carlo (Margaret Yvonne Middleton), actor, born September 1 1922; died January 8 2007.

Yvonne De Carlo

Margaret Yvonne Middleton (Yvonne De Carlo) actress: born Vancouver, British Columbia 1 September 1922; married 1955 Robert Morgan (one son, and one son deceased; marriage dissolved); died Woodland Hills, California 8 January 2007.

In her first starring role, Yvonne De Carlo was billed as "The Most Beautiful Woman in the World". In Hollywood biopics, her beauty inspired both Rimsky-Korsakov and Wagner. Although critics of her earlier assembly-line costume extravaganzas dubbed her "Yvonne the Terrible", the reliable De Carlo worked steadily for the better part of five decades, appearing on the big screen opposite such icons as Bob Hope, Burt Lancaster, Clark Gable, John Wayne and Charlton Heston, on the small screen as the vampiresque Lily in The Munsters and on Broadway in Follies, singing "I'm Still Here", Stephen Sondheim's triumphant anthem of showbiz survival, that boasts the line, "Then you career from career to career."

Who else could have played Lily Munster, Lola Montez, Calamity Jane, Scheherazade, Mary Magdalene and Moses's wife Sephora?

She was born Margaret Yvonne Middleton in Vancouver, Canada in 1922. She began dancing at an early age and, after moving to the United States, worked as a dancer and movie extra, graduated to short subjects, and finally made her feature-film début at Columbia Picture in Harvard, Here I Come (1942), a low-comedy "B" picture, starring the boxer "Slapsy Maxie" Rosenbloom. Like the film, her role was small, but a contract with Paramount Pictures followed.

Between 1942 and 1944 she acted in no less than 19 films, making subliminal appearances in This Gun For Hire, Let's Face it, So Proudly We Hail!, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Road to Morocco and a host of forgotten Paramount quickies.

Throughout the Second World War, the Queen of Universal Pictures was Maria Montez, whose ludicrous pieces of Technicolored high camp earned the studio a fortune. In 1945 De Carlo inherited the Montez mantle, beginning with Salome - Where She Danced (1945). She played an exotic dancer who, when knowledge of her espionage activities during the Franco-Prussian War came to light, fled to America. Soon she so dazzled the hard-bitten citizens of Drinkman's Wells, Arizona, that they changed the name of their town to Salome, Where She Danced. The critic James Agee called the film "The funniest deadpan parody I have ever seen."

She consolidated her stardom in Frontier Gal (1945), giving an assured comedy performance (in a role turned down by Montez) and singing three songs. Song of Scheherezade (1947) was the film involving dancer De Carlo's romance with young Russian naval cadet Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (Jean-Pierre Aumont). This outrageous fantasy ended with her dancing the Scheherezade ballet, the music she had inspired, at the St Petersburg Opera House.

Despite strong performances in two Burt Lancaster films, the taut prison drama Brute Force (1947) and the heist thriller Criss Cross (1949), she was mostly cast in such formula westerns as Black Bart (1948, as Lola Montez), Calamity Jane and Sam Bass and The Gal Who Took the West (both 1949), and such formula easterns as The Desert Hawk (1950, as the actual Princess Scheherazade) and Slave Girl (1947), which was so disastrous the desperate studio added a talking camel and other farcical sequences and released it as a satire.

Harold Arlen and Leo Robin wrote the Oscar-nominated "For Every Man There's a Woman" and other fine songs for Casbah (1948), a musical remake of Algiers, but De Carlo just had to look sensuous while Tony Martin, as Pepe LeMoko, sang them all. She did sing in Buccaneer's Girl (1950), but this pirate yarn was a typical Universal all-action potboiler.

Away from Hollywood, she suddenly confounded her detractors with deft comedy performances in two well-received British films. In Hotel Sahara (1952), set during the Second World War, she and her fiancé (Peter Ustinov) ran a small North African inn which kept changing sides according to the nationality of its occupiers. In The Captain's Paradise (1953), Alec Guinness, the blissfully contented skipper of a Tangier-to-Gibraltar ferry, had ideally contrasting wives in both ports: the fiery De Carlo in Tangier and the cosily domestic Celia Johnson on Gibraltar.

In Sea Devils (1953) De Carlo was a British spy during the Napoleonic wars. That same year she spied for the French in Fort Algiers, singing "I'll Follow You", for which she wrote the lyrics. She sang again as a sultry Caribbean café performer in Flame of the Islands (1956), and romanced Richard Wagner (Alan Badel) in the dismal Magic Fire (1956).

In 1957 the veteran Raoul Walsh, who had directed Sea Devils, gave De Carlo her meatiest screen role. Set before the Civil War and filmed largely on location in Louisiana, Band of Angels cast her as a well-reared southern belle who, when it's revealed that her mother was a slave, is herself sold into slavery. She is bought by a rakish southern millionaire - Clark Gable, making an anticlimactic return to Gone with the Wind territory.

Perhaps because she had played Sephora in The Ten Commandments two years earlier, she was next cast as Mary Magdalene in the Italian film La Spada e la Croce (The Sword and the Cross, 1958). As an attractive widow working as John Wayne's housekeeper, she aroused the jealousy of Wayne's estranged wife (Maureen O'Hara) in McLintock! (1963), and in A Global Affair (1964) acted opposite the 61- year-old Bob Hope, severely miscast as the footloose young UN diplomat pursued by a bevy of beautiful women of various nationalities.

From 1964 to 1966 De Carlo lived in a dark, cobwebby mansion at 1313 Mockingbird Lane. As the 137-year-old Lily Munster, she slept in a coffin with, appropriately, a lily clutched to her chest. Her beloved husband Herman (Fred Gwynne), a bashful clone of Frankenstein's monster, was Lily's idea of male beauty; after meeting a handsome male in one of the 70 episodes, she commented, "He looks like Cary Grant - poor man!" The success of The Munsters spawned the feature film Munster, Go Home (1966) and the TV movie The Munsters' Revenge (1981).

At the age of 49, De Carlo, along with her fellow Hollywood veterans Alexis Smith and Gene Nelson, appeared in Stephen Sondheim's spectacular Broadway musical Follies (1971). The show was set in a crumbling, soon-to-be-razed New York theatre where various editions of the fictitious Weismann Follies had been presented. On its bare stage, Dimitri Weismann held a farewell reunion of some of the performers he had employed in his revues over the years. One of these artistes was Carlotta Champion (De Carlo), an ageing Hollywood star.

Impressed with her large vocal range, Sondheim wrote De Carlo a solo number, the wickedly witty "Can that Boy Fox-Trot" ("A false alarm, / A broken arm, / An imitation Hitler and with littler charm, / But oh, can that boy fox-trot!"). She sang it well and, during the show's Boston try-out, Sondheim tried to build the number for her, but his efforts failed. "The problem with the one-joke song," he later said, "is that as the song goes on and on, the joke becomes less funny."

He solved his problem by sitting down with De Carlo and letting her tell him the story of her life. He then went to his hotel room and proceeded to write her a replacement number, the superb "I'm Still Here" ("First you're another / Sloe-eyed vamp / Then someone's mother / Then you're camp . . .").

Her Broadway success seemed to mean little to Hollywood, where De Carlo was offered nothing more interesting than TV movies (in one of which she played Zorro's mother) and such minor films as Satan's Cheerleaders (1977), Nocturna, Granddaughter of Dracula (1979), The Man with Bogart's Face (1980), Guyana: cult of the damned (1980), Silent Scream (1980), American Gothic (1987) and Oscar (1991).

Another line in "I'm Still Here" was "I'm almost through my memoirs". De Carlo's autobiography, Yvonne, was published in 1987.
Dick Vosburgh

Je ne savais pas qu'elle avait joué dans un musical de Stephen Sondheim à Broadway! Peut-être que Music Man a des détails sur cette partie de sa carrière?
Par contre, pratiquement pas un mot dans la presse écrite française....

[Richeliette]

Encore mais ça va s'arrêter oui!!!????

Pfffffff!!!!!

RIP Mme de Carlo

[Fan Rita]

RIP....Un joli visage qui s'efface

[Ballin Mundson]

oh mince!

Je l'aimais bien dans band of angels. Elle était émouvante dans les 10 commandements , et inquiétante en mémé cinglée dans american gothic.

[andrino]

Pour moi, Yvonne de Carlo, ce sont tous ces film d'aventure- aujourd'hui, on dirait serie b, que je voyais tout gamin au cinema de patronnage le jeudi; les acteurs s'appelaient : john Derek, Cornel Wilde..., les actrices: Yvonne de Carlo, Maureen o'hara, Linda Darnell;; Souvenirs, souvenirs!!!!

[Randolph Carter]

Premier film qui me vient à l'esprit : Criss Cross (Pour toi j'ai tué) avec B.Lancaster (et Tony Curtis en figurant).

pareil, ainsi que La Belle espionne de Walsh

R.I.P

Vous avez tout dit.
R.I.P.

[Ernst Preston Wilder]

Yep, rien que son rôle dans "Band of Angels" suffira à la placer au panthéon des Belles Séductrices...

[Cathy]

Buccaneer's Girl, La Fille des boucaniers (1950) - Frederick de Cordova



Au début du XIXème siècle, une jeune bostonienne Deborah McCoy s'embarque en tant que passagère clandestine sur un navire. Celui-ci est attaqué par le pirate Frederic Baptiste, qui l'embarque sur son bateau. Arrivée à la Nouvelle Orléans, elle devient la pensionnaire d'une maison pour jeunes femmes.

Après la relative déception de Against all Flags, ce deuxième film du coffret consacré aux Pirates n'est certes pas un chef d'oeuvre mais une aimable série B, aux décors et costumes soignés. Nous avons le droit aux clichés du genre, avec le combat de navires, l'abordage, mais l'originalité ici est que c'est une sorte de Robin des Bois des mers qui agit, donc pas de tuerie inutile, juste des vols. Le film met aussi l'accent sur l'histoire de la jeune fille qui est le centre de l'histoire. Frederick de Cordova réalise un bon petit film divertissant, où Yvonne de Carlo en fait des tonnes en jeune fille intrépide mais est tout à fait charmante dans ses numéros chantés et dansés pleins de vie et d'enthousiasme, elle est secondée par un inconnu Philip Friend qui est tout à fait crédible dans ce rôle de pirate au grand coeur, et Elsa Lanchester en espèce de protectrice de jeunes filles. Ce qui est intéressant ici aussi, c'est que nous ne sommes pas dans une histoire de pirates traditionnelles, avec ile de la Tortue, espagnols, anglais, etc. mais dans une histoire plus proche des USA où se déroule l'histoire . La copie proposée est magnifique et le technicolor resplendissant fait encore une fois des ravages !

[Jeremy Fox]

Buccaneer's Girl, La Fille des boucaniers (1950) - Frederick de Cordova



Au début du XIXème siècle, une jeune bostonienne Deborah McCoy s'embarque en tant que passagère clandestine sur un navire. Celui-ci est attaqué par le pirate Frederic Baptiste, qui l'embarque sur son bateau. Arrivée à la Nouvelle Orléans, elle devient la pensionnaire d'une maison pour jeunes femmes.

Après la relative déception de Against all Flags, ce deuxième film du coffret consacré aux Pirates n'est certes pas un chef d'oeuvre mais une aimable série B, aux décors et costumes soignés. Nous avons le droit aux clichés du genre, avec le combat de navires, l'abordage, mais l'originalité ici est que c'est une sorte de Robin des Bois des mers qui agit, donc pas de tuerie inutile, juste des vols. Le film met aussi l'accent sur l'histoire de la jeune fille qui est le centre de l'histoire. Frederick de Cordova réalise un bon petit film divertissant, où Yvonne de Carlo en fait des tonnes en jeune fille intrépide mais est tout à fait charmante dans ses numéros chantés et dansés pleins de vie et d'enthousiasme, elle est secondée par un inconnu Philip Friend qui est tout à fait crédible dans ce rôle de pirate au grand coeur, et Elsa Lanchester en espèce de protectrice de jeunes filles. Ce qui est intéressant ici aussi, c'est que nous ne sommes pas dans une histoire de pirates traditionnelles, avec ile de la Tortue, espagnols, anglais, etc. mais dans une histoire plus proche des USA où se déroule l'histoire . La copie proposée est magnifique et le technicolor resplendissant fait encore une fois des ravages !

Tout à fait d'accord. Je ne m'attendais à rien, je suis tombé sur une série B très plaisante d'autant qu'Yvonne de Carlo est pétillante et qu'elle porte le film sur ses épaules avec un entrain jamais démenti. Charmant film d'aventure avec beaucoup d'humour.

[feb]

(...) d'autant qu'Yvonne de Carlo est pétillante et qu'elle porte le film sur ses épaules avec un entrain jamais démenti. Charmant film d'aventure avec beaucoup d'humour.

Et quelles belles épaules merci Jeremy pour cette capture qui me réjouit et je trouve que la marinière lui sied à ravir

[Joe Gillis]

Hello,

Je suis récemment tombé sur ce vinyl de 1957, le seul qu'elle ait enregistré:



La belle aux yeux verts a en effet étudié le chant lyrique et voulait initialement faire une carrière de chanteuse d'opéra. Elle est d'ailleurs apparue dans un opéra de Strauss joué tout de même à l'Hollywood Bowl.

Le disque n'est pas terrible; elle reprend des standards et des Love Songs de jazz, et ce n'est clairement pas son répertoire! Elle ne chante pas très bien (trop rauque, trop emphatique: dans le genre Lizabeth Scott s'en sort mille fois mieux) et n'est pas vraiment aidée par les arrangements d'époque (très ringards avec violons sirupeux) signés... John Williams.
Mais malgré tout, j'avoue trouver quand même beaucoup de charme, désuet, à ce disque. Dans l'édition CD qu'on trouve facilement sur le net (couplé avec un album de Maureen O'Hara sur un même répertoire: un grand moment!), il y a dans les bonus un mambo et un rock chantés avec beaucoup d'humour et qui correspondent beaucoup mieux à sa voix.

Bref, le vinyl trône sur ma cheminée d'où j'ai l'impression qu'Yvonne me fait de l'œil...

[Jeremy Fox]

En même temps, je dois avouer que si j'aime beaucoup l'actrice, ses dons de chanteuse et danseuse ne m'ont jamais sautés aux yeux Elle chante à trois reprises dans Buccaneer's Girl sans m'avoir convaincu.

[Joe Gillis]

ses dons de chanteuse et danseuse ne m'ont jamais sautés aux yeux

Ah, c'est sûr, c'est pas Doris Day, pas vrai...
(j'en profite d'ailleurs pour te remercier de me l'avoir fait découvrir grâce à ton topic, je me délecte de tous ses films avec gourmandise )

[Jeremy Fox]

ses dons de chanteuse et danseuse ne m'ont jamais sautés aux yeux

Ah, c'est sûr, c'est pas Doris Day, pas vrai...
(j'en profite d'ailleurs pour te remercier de me l'avoir fait découvrir grâce à ton topic, je me délecte de tous ses films avec gourmandise )

Ah bien, ça fait extrêmement plaisir