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

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