Ballet led to the Batcave
Dancer landed movies, TV, Batgirl role
Yvonne Craig, who played the sexy, crime-fighting Batgirl in the 1960s TV hit Batman, has died. She was 78.
Craig died Monday at her Los Angeles home from complications from breast cancer, her family said.
Born May 16, 1937 in Taylorville, Ill., she began her career as a ballet dancer, the youngest member of The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, with which she toured for three years.
Then Hollywood discovered her and she appeared in a 1958 episode of Perry Mason and in the 1959 feature The Young Land.
After that, she won dozens of roles in TV shows, as well as costarring in two 1960s Elvis Presley films, It Happened at the World’s Fair (1963) and Kissin’ Cousins (1964).
Other movie roles include Gidget, Mars Needs Women and In Like Flint.
But she was best known as Batgirl (and her alter ego, librarian Barbara Gordon, Commissioner Gordon’s daughter) in the 196768 season of ABC’s Batman. In the Perry Mason episode, actor Neil Hamilton played her stepfather. Hamilton would later play her father on Batman.
Craig had another memorable TV role in the original Star Trek TV series. In the episode Whom Gods Destroy she is Marta, the green Orion slave girl who wants to kill Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner.
In 2000 she published a memoir, From Ballet to the Batcave and Beyond.