Saturday Sultress - Yvonne Craig, RIP

Yvonne Craig, TV's Batgirl

Pioneer female Superhero dies at 78.

• So many of the stars I grew up with are passing.  So sad.

(Washington Post)  -  As dynamic as the Dynamic Duo was, Batman and Robin always seemed to be getting into jams they couldn’t find their way out of on ABC in the 1960s. And, in their show’s third and final season, the Caped Crusaders often found rescue from an unlikely superhero: Batgirl, Commissioner Gordon’s daughter and a Batman devotee who proved ready to lend a “Sock!” or “Kapow!” in any melee with the Joker, the Penguin or Catwoman.

Fifty years ago, this was feminism — of a sort. Batgirl often saved the day, but seemed slightly resented.

Batman: “She does make a colorful reinforcement, all right, but I don’t want her to think we can’t fight our own battles.” Robin: “Gosh no, Batman!”

Now, Yvonne Craig, the formally trained dancer-turned-actress who donned yellow-and-blue leather to play Batgirl, has died at 78. The cause was breast cancer that spread to her liver, as Variety reported.

You can find anything on the net, so why not post it?

As a young girl, Craig perhaps could not have predicted that she would become famous as a third-tier character on a cult TV show. Born in 1937, she started training at 10 to be a ballet dancer. She was accepted by the famed George Balanchine for the School of American Ballet; this not being prestigious enough, she threw in her lot with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, a later generation of the famed Ballet Russes.

“I was born turned out — a natural dancer,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2002.

Craig drifted in television in the late 1950s, with appearances on “Perry Mason” and “Gidget.” In 1963 and 1964, she appeared in two films alongside Elvis Presley: “It Happened at the World’s Fair” and “Kissin’ Cousins.”

Craig was meh on the power of the King’s smooches.

“It was a long time ago — I’ve kissed a lot of people since then,” she said in 2002. “I’ll tell you what: He wasn’t the best, but he wasn’t the worst — or I’d remember.”

The role that would define her career came in 1967. As the ratings for “Batman” flagged, the thinking behind introducing a new character was not complicated. Producer Charles Fitzsimons explained the logic in a documentary: “Well, we’ll give Commissioner Gordon a daughter, and she will be like a female Batman.”

“Holy transformation!” a narrator intoned in a spot about the character filmed for ABC. “One minute plain Barbara Gordon: librarian and Commissioner Gordon’s daughter. And the next minute … Batgirl, modeled after her idol Batman, ready for this crucial moment and off to make her first foray in her own beautiful, beguiling way!”

“I think they probably chose me because they knew I had a dance background,” Craig said. “… I ultimately did my own stunts.” Another bonus: She could ride a motorcycle and so could do “the stuff on the bikes.”

Read More . . . .

Craig as Orion slave girl "Marta" in the 1969 Star Trek original
series episode "Whom Gods Destroy".

Batgirl in chains.
Yes some of us have been there on long lonely nights.