For the first half of the 20th century, Hollywood was just crazy for Latina film goddesses. There was Myrtle Gonzalez (1891-1918), one of Hollywood’s very first Latinx movie stars. She worked in silent pictures, and died at 27 years old, ironically of the “Spanish Flu”. In her short lifetime, she still managed to acquire 80 film credits.
Beatriz Michelena (1890 – 1942), was born in New York City to Venezuelan parents, and she not only starred in more than a dozen movies between 1914 and 1920, she also started Beatriz Michelena Features, her very own production company. And this was in 1917 when women couldn’t even vote!
Mexico-born Dolores del Río (1904 – 1983) was offered plenty of clichéd film roles. She got her start in silent pictures, and she made the transition into talkies although her accent made it difficult to get the best roles. Undeterred, she went back to Mexico to work and then became one of the biggest stars in her native country.
Anita Page (1910- 2008) was born in El Salvador and started acting in the late 1920s. At one point, she was one of the most popular stars at MGM, receiving the second largest amount of fan mail after Greta Garbo.
Born in Mexico, Lupe Vélez (1908 -1944) succeeded in Hollywood by using the nickname “Mexican Spitfire”. She started off doing serious dramatic roles, and then moved to comedies. Vélez’s personal life was as colorful as her screen persona. She had several highly publicized affairs. In 1944, Vélez died of an overdose of the barbiturate drug Seconal. Her death and the circumstances surrounding it have been the subject of much speculation and controversy.
For a few years in the 1940s, Latin-American Maria Montez (1912 -1951) was the queen of Universal Studios, starring in Technicolored romantic exotic movies, referred to as “tits and sandal” epics. When Montez, whose acting ability was as minimal as her costumes, started losing her appeal, along came Yvonne De Carlo, just as gorgeous, but loaded with talented, to take her place.
The film that brought De Carlo stardom was Salome, Where She Danced (1945), an unintentionally laughable story of a Mata Hari-ish dancer who has an opera house built for her and a town named after her in the American Wild West. Salome, Where She Danced was made by Universal who had signed De Carlo to a long term contract. She was used by the studio as the backup to Montez, and her second film for the studio, she was given the role rejected by Montez in another nutty western, Frontier Gal (1946), where she is paired with Rod Cameron. Like Salome, it was shot in gorgeous Technicolor. In 1946, exhibitors voted De Carlo one of “The Promising Stars of Tomorrow”.
De Carlo’s foreign-sounding name was perfect for an actor who appeared in films with titles like Slave Girl (1947), Song Of Sheherazade (1947), Casbah (1948) and The Desert Hawk (1950). Perfect, except that her real name was Margaret Middleton, and she was Canadian.
Her showbiz name was taken from her French mother’s maiden name. When she was three, her father abandoned the family, forcing her 17-year-old mother to work. Her mother recognized the potential in her daughter and enrolled her in a dance classes in Vancouver. In 1940, 18-years-old Peggy Middleton went to Hollywood and became “Yvonne De Carlo”.
She took jobs dancing in nightclubs, before being cast in a bit part as a bathing beauty in Harvard, Here I Come (1942). Because of her bronze beauty, she was cast as “exotics”, such as a harem girl in Road To Morocco (1942), as a Spanish girl in For Whom The Bell Tolls (1943), as a Native American in The Deerslayer (1943), some sort of “Arab” dancer in Kismet (1944), and a Javanese dancer in The Story Of Dr. Wassell (1944).
Frontier Gal is a comedy western with De Carlo as a super seductive saloon owner manipulating a bandit (Cameron) into a shotgun wedding. After that her two go-to jobs were roles in horse operas and camel operas.
In the outrageously kitsch biopic Song Of Sheherazade, De Carlo played a Moroccan nightclub dancer named Cara de Talavera inspiring Russian sailor Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (Jean-Pierre Aumont) to become a composer. In one of her numbers she sings: “Me, oh, my, sounds like the buzzing of a bee!” She later turns up in St. Petersburg as the prima ballerina in his new ballet. She also plays a dancer in Slave Girl, but a talking camel steals the movie.
She was a good singer and an even better dancer, plus she really could act. In Jules Dassin‘s prison drama Brute Force (1947), she plays 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), she is caught between her nasty current husband, Dan Duryea, and her ex, Burt Lancaster.
She went back and forth between femme fatales, such as singer Lola Montez in Black Bart (1948), and tough broads in Calamity Jane And Sam Bass (1949) and Buccaneer’s Girl (1950). Through the 1950s she continued to successfully play saloon girls and cabaret singers in films that were sort of dumb, yet quite entertaining to a gay teenager watching the local television station’s afternoon movie.
She had real comedic chops that are shown to advantage in two British films: Hotel Sahara (1951) as Peter Ustinov‘s cheating fiancée, and in intriguingly odd The Captain’s Paradise (1953), where bigamist Alec Guinness has to deal with her very tempestuous Latin character.
She plays Sephora, the wife of Moses (a role taken by gun-loving Republican Charlton Heston) in Cecil B. DeMille‘s epic Easter favorite The Ten Commandments (1956), then she is a beautiful mulatto woman opposite Clark Gable in Band Of Angels (1957), but after that, De Carlo found a new career and even greater fame doing television. She is now mostly remembered for a role in a silly sitcom, and we will always love her for that.
For The Munsters (1964-66), De Carlo transformed herself from a vamp into a vampire as Lily Munster, loving wife to monster “Herman” (Fred Gwynne), and mother to baby wolfman “Eddie” (Butch Patrick). With her silver-streaked hair and pale makeup, she played the Transylvanian-born Mrs. Munster as an ordinary American housewife, but she couldn’t hide her beauty.
The series aired on Thursdays at 7:30 pm on CBS for a total of 70 episodes. It was cancelled after ratings dropped because of the huge popularity of ABC’s campy Batman, which aired at the same time and was in color. The Munsters finally found its audience in syndication, which brought a spin-off series, a primetime special, as well as several films, including Munster, Go Home (1966) where the family inherits an English mansion, and they even reunited on television in 1981 for The Munsters’ Revenge.
After that, De Carlo needed work, after all, a girl has to pay her bills. She appeared in musicals in summer stock and in schlock movies such as Russ Meyer‘s silky soft-core The Seven Minutes (1971), where she plays a senator who writes a steamy pornographic novel under a pseudonym. In Satan’s Cheerleaders (1977), she gets to deliver the line: “Kill! Mutilate! Destroy!“, before being ripped apart by devil dogs.
I am so fortunate that I got to see De Carlo in a career high point. In 1971, she played aging showgirl “Carlotta Campion” in Stephen Sondheim‘s Follies (my second favorite musical of all time) on Broadway, stopping the show with I’m Still Here. She sang the Sondheim lyric: “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 here!” with special poignancy for those of us who remembered her Hollywood days.
She continued doing supporting roles on stage, television, and films into the early-1990s. In 1998, De Carlo suffered a stroke and then became a resident of the Motion Picture & Television Country House in Woodland Hills, where she spent her last years. She was taken by heart failure in 2007.
De Carlo became a naturalized citizen of the USA and she was an active Republican. A true conservative, she told an interviewer:
“I’m all for men and I think they ought to stay up there and be the bosses and have women wait on them hand and foot and put their slippers on and hand them the pipe and serve seven course meals, as long as they open the door, support the woman, and do their duty in the bedroom.”
Silly Tid-Bit: I was 17 years old when Follies was on Broadway in 1971 and I played the fuck out of the original Broadway cast album. Crazy for de Carlo’s big number, but being a brat, I changed the lyric to: “I got through a six pack of beer, and I’m queer…”
