Born Peggy Yvonne Middleton in British Columbia, Canada, she moved to Hollywood to find work and fame as an actress. She found it, first in uncredited walk-ons in Harvard, Here I Come! (1941) and The Deerslayer (1943), but soon she started getting starring roles.
She worked alongside such leading men as Burt Lancaster, Joel McCrea, Ricardo Montalban, Rock Hudson, Clark Gable, Alec Guinness, and David Niven. She even played the wife of Charlton Heston’s Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956), and ended up as “one of the legendary glamour queens of the 40s and 50s,” said producer Kevin Burns.
But what she’ll be remembered for is a leading role on a TV show that lasted only two seasons: The Munsters, a campy 1964 show that became a cult classic. Playing the wife of Herman Munster, a Frankenstein-like working stiff who didn’t realize her family was somewhat odd, she moved into permanent youth in TV Land. She had later roles, and in fact appeared in more than 100 films, but she ended up in the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital, where she died January 8 from heart failure. She was 84.