Actress Beverly Owen, who played the beautiful, non-monstrous Marilyn Munster in the first 13 episodes of the 1960s CBS comedy "The Monsters/The Nunsters," has died at age 81. a few days ago at his home in Vermont, Deadline revealed this Monday.
Her death was confirmed by her former co-star Butch Patrick, who played the little wolf boy Eddie Munster in the series (1964-1966), and is today the only survivor of that first star cast.
Patrick posted on Facebook: "The beautiful Beverley Owen has left us. What a sweet soul. I was in love with her. RIP Bev and thank you for your 13 memorable Marilyn Munster episodes."
Owen's daughter, Polly Stone, revealed to TMZ that her mother died after a battle with ovarian cancer, which she was diagnosed with in 2017 and that she preferred to keep private. According to Stone, the former actress was surrounded by friends and family at her Vermont home when she passed away.
Beverly Owen's acting career was short-lived. After debuting in "As the World Turns" and as a guest star in another half-dozen series in the early '60s, the actress with a Marilyn Monroe-style blonde wig played Marilyn Munster in the first 13 episodes of "The Family."
Monster / The Munsters", the comedy about a friendly family of monsters: Fred Gwynne as Herman Frankenstein, Yvonne De Carlo as the vampire woman Lily, Al Lewis as the vampire grandfather, and Patrick as a kind of werewolf-man hybrid child. vampire. Marilyn was the only Munster who seemed normal to the outside world.
Owen left the first season of "The Munsters" to marry Jon Stone, a writer, producer and editor who would continue a long association with "Sesame Street." The couple divorced in 1974, and the former actress is said to have returned to school to earn a master's degree. Beverly Owen was replaced in the series by Pat Priest, with whom she shared a great physical resemblance.
In fact, 82-year-old Pat Priest and 65-year-old Butch Patrick are the only ones still alive, since Frederick Hubbard Gwynne, who played Herman Munster, died in 1993; Yvonne De Carlo, who was Lilly Munster died in 2007; and Al Lewis, the grandfather, a frequent guest at the Havana Festival and a socialist sympathizer, died in 2006.
Although in 2017 the NBC network took up the idea of rebooting "The Monster Family / The Munsters", written by Jill Kargman, since then nothing more has been heard about the evolution of the project. According to Variety, "The reboot will be inspired by the original series. An unconventional family, determined to stay true to themselves, struggles to fit into the hipster neighborhood of Brooklyn."
Already in 2012, an attempt was made to carry out a similar version of the series but without success, where NBC itself came to record the pilot for it, based on the characters. It was called "Mockingbird Lane" (the street in the Californian housing estate where they lived), it was directed by none other than Bryan Singer and starred Jerry O'Connell as Herman Munster, Portia de Rossi as his wife Lily, Eddie Izzard in the role of the grandfather Munster and Charity Wakefield as cousin Marilyn, the only "non-monstrous" character in the family.
Ultimately, the channel did not produce the entire series, but aired the episode as a special to celebrate Halloween in 2012. Eight years earlier, in 2004, the Wayans brothers, who are behind the popular "Scary movie" saga and other cartoons genre, they tried to make a film, which never materialized.
