Actress was best known as Batgirl in ’60s TV series
Yvonne Craig, the actress best known as Batgirl on the hit 1960s television series “Batman,” died Monday at her home in Pacific Palisades, California. She was 78.
Her death was announced on her official website.
Craig’s family said in a statement that she had breast cancer, which eventually metastasized to her liver, for more than two years, but that she had kept her condition private.
“She wanted to spend all of her energy concentrating on winning her battle,” the statement said. “She was adamant about this and wanted to tell her story when she was cured and feeling better.”
Craig’s Batgirl added a scrappy girl-power element to “Batman,” the campy series based on the long-running comic book, which starred Adam West as the costumed crime-fighter and Burt Ward as Robin, his young sidekick. The show’s only other prominent female character was the slithery, sexy villain Catwoman, played first by Julie Newmar and then by Eartha Kitt. Craig joined the show in September 1967, at the beginning of its third and final season.
Batgirl, who was secretly the daughter of Police Commissioner Gordon and whose purple and yellow outfit contrasted with Batman’s starker look, was known for jumping into the fray, delivering a few pows and zaps of her own to villains.
Before she began her acting career, Craig was a ballet dancer. She traveled for several years with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo as its youngest member. Her many TV credits besides “Batman” included “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “Kojak,” “Starsky and Hutch,” “Mod Squad,” “77 Sunset Strip,” “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” “Love, American Style” and “Emergency!”
In one of her more memorable roles, Craig played Marta, a greenskinned slave girl, in the “Star Trek” episode “Whom Gods Destroy.” She performed a seductive, loose-limbed dance that seemed to nearly overwhelm William Shatner’s red-blooded Captain Kirk, while Leonard Nimoy’s Spock pronounced it “mildly interesting.”
She also appeared in a number of movies, including two that starred Elvis Presley: “It Happened at the World’s Fair’’ (1963) and ”Kissin’ Cousins” (1964).
When her Hollywood career ended, she began working as a real estate broker. She returned to television in 2009 as the voice of the character Grandma on the Nickelodeon cartoon series “Olivia,” a role she played until 2011.
Yvonne Joyce Craig was born on May 16, 1937, in Taylorville, Ill., and reared in Ohio.
Her autobiography, “From Ballet to the Batcave and Beyond,” was published in 2000.
Survivors include her husband, Kenneth Aldrich, and her sister, Meridel Carson.