Nina Shipman, who came from a prominent show business family to star alongside Fred MacMurray in The Oregon Trail and step in for Grandpa in a ploy to make Lily jealous on one of the wackiest episodes of The Munsters, has died. She was 88.
Shipman died Sunday of natural causes in a hospital in Gardena, California, her stepdaughter Lianne Bremer told The Hollywood Reporter.
In her big-screen debut, Shipman portrayed a woman mistaken for Kim Novak’s Madeleine Elster (or maybe it was Judy Barton?) in a very brief, uncredited role for Alfred Hitchcock in Vertigo (1958).
As a contract player at 20th Century Fox, she appeared alongside Bing Crosby as a chorus girl in Frank Tashlin’s Say One for Me (1959) and as his daughter in Blake Edwards’ High Time (1960), in which Crosby’s wealthy restaurateur goes back to college at age 51.
In The Oregon Trail (1959), Shipman played Prudence Cooper, a woman caught in a love triangle with MacMurray’s newspaper reporter and the leader of the wagon train (William Bishop), who’s also an agent for President James K. Polk. (The movie wagon train “crossed” the U.S. in a scant 12 days, all on the Fox lot in Century City.)
When a bored Lily (Yvonne De Carlo) takes a job on the 1965 Munsters episode “Lily Munster, Girl Model,” Herman (Fred Gwynne) is determined to make her quit, so he swallows a pill from Grandpa (Al Lewis) that transforms him into a Texas playboy. Grandpa takes another pill and becomes a gorgeous young blond — that’s Shipman — and she/he and Herman take in a fashion show where Lily is modeling and get cozy.
“It was really kind of cool,” Shipman said in 2024. “I spoke my own lines, and then after we were through shooting, [Lewis’] voice was dubbed over into my lines so that I talked like Grandpa.” She also got to make like she was smoking a cigar.
Nina Shipman with Robert Wagner in the 1959 film ‘Say One for Me.’
20th Century Fox Film Corp./Courtesy Everett Collection
Shipman was born in Los Angeles on Aug. 15, 1938. Her father, Barry Shipman, was a screenwriter of Westerns who also wrote for Dick Tracy movies in the 1930s and TV’s Lassie in the 1960s. Her mother, Gwynne Shipman, was a dancer and actress with credits including Hopalong Cassidy Returns.
Going back a generation, her grandmother Nell Shipman was a silent film actress and her grandfather Ernest Shipman a member of one of the first Shakespearean touring companies in the U.S.
Shipman attended Maddox Academy in Mexico City and Eagle Rock High School in Los Angeles and graduated from UCLA with a degree in music. She also studied acting with Sanford Meisner and appeared at the Pasadena Playhouse.
After showing up uncredited in films including The Hunters (1958), In Love and War (1958) and Compulsion (1959), she shared scenes with Robert Wagner and Stella Stevens in Say One for Me and portrayed the daughter of Macdonald Carey and Marsha Hunt in Blue Denim (1959).
After that, the charming Shipman worked mainly in television, and on the 1966 Andy Griffith Show episode “The County Clerk,” she played Irene Fairchild, a nurse who shares a romance with Howard Sprague (Jack Dodson).
Her TV résumé also included installments of Sugarfoot, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Surfside 6, Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, Bonanza, Rawhide, Dr. Kildare, Daniel Boone, Perry Mason, Burke’s Law, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Mod Squad, Adam-12, Highway to Heaven and General Hospital.
In 1960, she served as maid of honor at actress Jill St. John’s wedding to Woolworth heir Lance Reventlow in San Francisco.
She wrote a 1975 book, How to Become an Actor in Television Commercials, and hosted Contemporary Health Issues, a 1981 series of 30 half-hour episodes that students could use to earn college credits. Topics included sexuality, drugs, birth control, cardiovascular disease and alcoholism.
She also was an accomplished pianist, a practitioner of falconry, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Hilo and a mentor to many through a theater company on the Big Island.
Survivors also include her daughters, Westerly and Lani, and her grandchildren, Bryson, Serena, Cole, Charlie and Clover.
Shipman was married to Richard Harrington from 1956 until their 1958 divorce, to actor and stuntman C. Ransom Walrod from 1961 until their 1973 divorce and to choral conductor Donald Bremer from 1975 until his 2015 death.
Rhett Bartlett contributed to this report.