Yvonne De Carlo

Throughout the initial years of her career, Yvonne De Carlo was linked with multiple influential men, including industrialist Howard Hughes and actor Robert Stack. She was even briefly engaged to actor Howard Duff before meeting stuntman Robert Drew "Bob" Morgan on the set of ‘Shotgun’ in 1955. At the time Morgan was married and De Carlo had no intention to sabotage that relationship.

After the death of Morgan’s wife, they grew close, and eventually wed on November 21, 1955, at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Reno, Nevada. They had two sons together, Bruce (born 1956) and Michael Morgan (1957). The marriage ended in a divorce in 1973.

She became a naturalized US citizen and was a conservative Republican who campaigned for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Gerald Ford.

Yvonne De Carlo was born Margaret Yvonne Middleton on September 1, 1922, in West Point Grey, British Columbia, Canada, to parents William Middleton and Marie De Carlo. She was of English descent from her father’s side and of Italian and Scottish ancestry from her mother’s.

After her father abandoned the family when she was three years old, she was raised by her mother and her Presbyterian maternal grandparents at Vancouver’s West End neighborhood.

She studied at Lord Roberts Elementary School, later attending King Edward High School. Her mother entered her in the June Roper School of the Dance in Vancouver which eventually led to her enrollment in the prestigious B.C. School of Dancing.

Yvonne De Carlo’s mother played a pivotal role in preparing her for the glamorous life. Marie took her daughter to Los Angeles so that she could participate in several beauty pageants. This was when she met American showman Nils Granlund who employed her at the Florentine Gardens and in January 1941, offered her sponsorship after she was arrested by the US immigration officials.

She left Florentine Gardens within a year, wanting to pursue a career in acting. She appeared in a series of uncredited roles after her first film ‘‘Harvard, Here I Come’. As there was no immediate theatrical success, she kept herself active in the Los Angeles night club scene.

She was part of two revues named ‘Hollywood Revels’ and ‘Glamour over Hollywood’ in 1941, and the 1942 three-minute Soundies musical ‘The Lamp of Memory’. She also performed for US servicemen during World War II.

Sometime in 1942 she signed with Paramount Pictures as the backup for Dorothy Lamour and continued to play uncredited parts in films, such as ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ (1943), ‘Let's Face It’ (1943), and ‘So Proudly We Hail!’ (1943). De Carlo was loaned to Republic Pictures for the 1943 film ‘The Deerslayer’, in which she played a young native American woman named Wah-Tah.

She was reportedly chosen over 20,000 aspirants to portray the protagonist in ‘Salome, Where She Danced’, a Technicolor production. Though critically panned, the film was a box-office success. The movie heralded her long-term contract with Universal Pictures. She was subsequently cast in ‘Frontier Gal’ (1946), ‘Black Bart’ (1948), ‘Casbah’ (1948), ‘Criss Cross’ (1949), ‘Calamity Jane and Sam Bass’ (1949), ‘The Gal Who Took the West’ (1950), and the British film ‘Hotel Sahara’ (1951).

Yvonne De Carlo was cast as Sephora opposite Charlton Heston’s Moses in the American biblical epic film ‘The Ten Commandments’. Released in October 1956, the film initially earned $122.7 million at the box-office and won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. Critics praised De Carlo for her performance, with Bosley Crowther of ‘The New York Times’ calling it “notably good”.