Los Angeles ? Yvonne De Carlo, the beautiful star who played Moses’ wife in “The Ten Commandments” but achieved her greatest popularity on TV’s “The Munsters,” has died. She was 84.

De Carlo died of natural causes Monday at the Motion Picture & Television facility in suburban Los Angeles, longtime friend and television producer Kevin Burns said Wednesday.

De Carlo, whose shapely figure helped launch her career in B-movie desert adventures and Westerns, rose to more important roles in the 1950s. Later, she had a key role in a landmark Broadway musical, Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies.”

But for TV viewers, she will always be known as Lily Munster in the 1964-1966 slapstick horror-movie spoof “The Munsters.” The series (the name allegedly derived from “fun-monsters”) offered a gallery of Universal Pictures grotesques, including Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, in a cobwebbed gothic setting.

Lily, vampire-like in a black gown, presided over the faux scary household and was a rock for her gentle but often bumbling husband, Herman, played by 6-foot-5-inch character actor Fred Gwynne (decked out as the Frankenstein monster).

“I think she will best remembered as the definitive Lily Munster. She was the vampire mom to millions of baby boomers. In that sense, she’s iconic,” Burns said Wednesday.

“But it would be a shame if that’s the only way she is remembered. She was also one of the biggest beauty queens of the ’40s and ’50s, one of the most beautiful women in the world. This was one of the great glamour queens of Hollywood, one of the last ones.”

De Carlo was able to sustain a long career by repeatedly reinventing herself. A longtime student of voice, she sang opera at the Hollywood Bowl. When movie roles became scarce, she ventured into stage musicals.

Actress Yvonne De Carlo, dressed for her role as Lily Munster in the film Munster,

Her greatest stage triumph came on Broadway in 1971 with “Follies,” which won the 1972 Tony award for best original musical score. She belted out Sondheim’s showstopping number, “I’m Still Here,” a former star’s defiant recounting of the highs and lows of her life and career.

The Canadian-born De Carlo began her career with a parade of bit parts in films of the early 1940s, then emerged as a star in 1945 with “Salome – Where She Danced,” a routine movie about a dancer from Vienna who becomes a spy in the wild West.

Universal Pictures exploited her slightly exotic looks and a shape that looked ideal in a harem dress in such “sex-and-sand” programmers as “Song of Scheherazade,” “Slave Girl,” “Casbah” and “Desert Hawk.”

The studio also employed her to add zest to Westerns, usually as a dance-hall girl or a gun-toting sharpshooter. Among the titles: “Frontier Gal,” “Black Bart” (as Lola Montez), “River Lady,” “Calamity Jane and Sam Bass” (as Calamity Jane) and “The Gal Who Took the West.”

In 1956 Cecil B. DeMille chose her to play Sephora, wife to Charlton Heston’s Moses in “The Ten Commandments.” The following year she co-starred with Clark Gable and Sidney Poitier in “Band of Angels” as Gable’s upper-class sweetheart who learns of her black forebears.

In 1955, De Carlo married Bob Morgan, a top-flight stunt man, and the marriage produced two sons, Bruce and Michael, as well as much-publicized separations and reconciliations.

During a stunt aboard a moving log train for “How the West Was Won,” Morgan was thrown underneath the wheels. The accident cost him a leg, and for a time De Carlo abandoned her career to care for him. They later divorced.

In her late years, De Carlo lived in semiretirement near Solvang, north of Santa Barbara. Her son Michael died in 1997, and she suffered a stroke the following year.