In the 1940s and early 1950s Yvonne De Carlo was Hollywood’s favourite Arabian Nights heroine, a dark-haired beauty waiting for a handsome leading man to loosen her chains. If her function was to look decorative, rather than to stretch herself as an actress, she carried it off with style.

But despite efforts to broaden her range she became typecast in exotic roles and when these were no longer in demand, her career floundered. Ironically, it was with another exotic character, Lily in The Munsters, that she won a new following from a generation who barely remembered her films.

She was born Peggy Yvonne Middleton in Vancouver, Canada. Her parents divorced when she was 5, and she owed her start in showbusiness to her ambitious mother who, despite difficult financial circumstances, saved up enough to send her to the Vancouver School of Dance. She also gained experience as an actress, appearing in several of the city’s theatres.

In 1937 she went to California to study dance and dramatics at the Fanchon and Marco School in Los Angeles. It became an annual six-month ritual and by 1941 she was also performing in theatres and nightclubs. Spotted by Hollywood talent scouts, she was put under contract by Paramount.

She started unpromisingly, playing opposite men making screen tests, but from that graduated to bit parts in films. Her first leading role came in 1945 when the producer, Walter Wanger, billing her as “the most beautiful girl in the world”, cast her in Salome Where She Danced.

Playing a European dancer who settles in Arizona in the 1860s, De Carlo transcended a risible plot and scored a personal success that moulded her career. For a while exotic Eastern roles became her trademark and she donned the harem costume for The Song of Scheherazade and Slave Girl (both 1947). She played the dancer, Lola Montez, in Black Bart (1948) and returned to Scheherazade in The Desert Hawk (1950).

In 1947 she made her first appearance in modern dress in the prison drama, Brute Force. Two years later she played Burt Lancaster’s treacherous ex-wife, and received a memorable screen kiss from him, in the moody thriller Criss Cross. It was one of her best films but one of the least typical.

When she exhausted her repertoire of Eastern temptresses, the studio put her in another type of costume drama, the western. She had an early stab in Frontier Gal, playing a bar girl forced to marry an outlaw, and she turned increasingly to the genre, where she was often cast as a forceful heroine.

In the 1950s, in a very different vein, she made two films in Britain: Hotel Sahara, where she starred opposite Peter Ustinov, and The Captain’s Paradise, in which she played Alec Guinness’s wife, revealing a talent for comedy she was seldom able to display elsewhere.

In 1956 she was back in costume playing Sephora, wife of Charlton Heston’s Moses, in Cecil B. de Mille’s The Ten Commandments, and was a mulatto girl sold as a slave in 19thcentury Kentucky in Band of Angels, with Clark Gable.

After well-publicised liaisons with the millionaire businessman Howard Hughes, Aly Khan, Errol Flynn and others, she married Robert Morgan, a film stuntman, in 1955. They had two sons, Bruce and Michael.

In 1962 her husband lost a leg after being crushed under a train during the shooting of How the West was Won and spent more than a year in hospitals, running up huge bills. With her own film work drying up she was forced to do a raunchy dance routine in European night clubs in order to keep the family.

The boisterous comedy western, McLintock (1963), in which she played a cook who falls downstairs with John Wayne, was a welcome return to the screen, and she went on to play occasional supporting parts in films without ever suggesting that she would regain her former eminence.

But on television she had a big hit as the 156-year-old Dracula-inspired Lily Munster opposite Fred Gwynne’s Herman in the spoof horror series, The Munsters, which ran for two years in the mid-1960s. She also appeared in several made-for-television films.

In 1971 she was on the Broadway stage playing a movie star in Stephen Sondheim’s musical Follies. One of her numbers, I’m Still Here, became a theme song, reassuring a public with fickle memories that the glamorous screen star of the 1940s and 1950s had not faded into oblivion.

Her marriage ended in divorce in 1974.

Yvonne De Carlo, actress, was born on September 1, 1922. She died on January 8, 2007, aged 84