Yvonne Craig was not only a beautiful and experienced screen actress when she landed the role of Batgirl in the 1960s Batman television series, she was also an ex-ballet dancer and a biker. She was the ideal addition to the show, which was beginning to lose its audience and look a little jaded after two seasons.
Craig could speed into the fray on her Batcycle and handle the balletic action scenes with her temperamental co-stars Adam West and Burt Ward. She soon became an unlikely feminist icon.
Her character emerged in the dual roles of Batgirl and Barbara Gordon, the librarian daughter of the Gotham City police chief. In her debut episode, the arch-villain, the Penguin, kidnapped Barbara with the intention of marrying her to make him immune from the law.
Batman and Robin set out to save her. Having changed into her Batgirl costume, she hopped onto her Batcycle and ended up rescuing them. When she changed back to Barbara Gordon once more, she allowed them to “rescue” her — without the “dynamic duo” ever working out that Batgirl and Barbara were the same person.
While Batman and Robin had their Batmobile, Craig rode around on her own stylised motorbike, a customised Yamaha 180, although she revealed that in reality it was no superbike and frequently broke down.
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“I rode a motorcycle in those days because it was fun,” she said. “But the Batcycle was very difficult. They had taken off the shock absorbers to put on the bat wings, so whenever I went over a bump, it was like jumping off a table stiff-legged. It would really jar my teeth.”
She did not keep the machine at the end of the run. She said that the Batgirl trimmings were simply stripped off it and somebody bought it to use as an ordinary motorbike.
There were problems with her costume too. “My first Batgirl mask made little dents on my face,” she said. “Basically, when I took it off, it looked like I had been crying for weeks. So they changed that and opened up the eyes so I could see better. Poor Adam could never see out of his mask.”
Although her addition to the show proved popular with girls, it did not halt the fall in ratings and Batman was cancelled after the third season. In one interview, however, she said that repeats were always being shown somewhere in the world.
Born Yvonne Joyce Craig in Taylorville, Illinois, she grew up in Columbus, Ohio, trained as a ballet dancer from a young age and joined the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo in 1954. She spent three years touring with the company and only began acting to fill in time before joining another dance company.
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However, she never did join another dance company. A starring role opposite Patrick Wayne in the western The Young Land (1959) led to a string of other roles. She appeared with Elvis Presley in It Happened at the World’s Fair and Kissin’ Cousins, and was a guest in several television shows, including The Man from U.N.C.L.E. After Batman, she continued acting through the Sixties and Seventies and played Marta, a beautiful but insane green-skinned alien, in an episode of Star Trek.
She had business interests, in property with her second husband, Kenneth Aldrich, and in prepaid phone cards. The couple travelled extensively. She was also a collector. She started a collection of ceramic frogs in her teens and later brought home ceremonial masks from her trips around the world. She never collected Batman souvenirs
She was briefly married to the singer Jimmy Boyd in the early 1960s, but they divorced. She is survived by Aldrich. There were no children.
A few years after Batman ended she donned her Batgirl costume one last time in a promotional film for equal pay. “They asked if I would be interested, and I said yes. It was a great cause. Adam wanted nothing to do with Batman at that time, and so he wouldn’t do it. I teased him that it had nothing to do with Batman — he just didn’t want equal pay for women.”
Yvonne Craig, actress, was born on May 16, 1937. She died of complications from cancer on August 17, 2015, aged 78