Lorene Yarnell

Lorene Yarnell, a native Angeleno, was a dancer and actress in movies and television shows, including Sweet Charity, Bye Bye Birdie, Shindig! and The Carol Burnett Show, as well as in stage musicals, before she met Shields, in San Francisco. Lorene Yarnell and Robert Shields met when they worked on Fol-de-Rol, a 1972 Sid and Marty Krofft TV special. Shields and Yarnell's specialty was a series of skits called The Clinkers in which they assumed the personae of robots, with many individual, deliberate motions (as opposed to normal smooth motion) stereotypical of robots and early animatronics, enhanced by their ability to refrain from blinking their eyes for long stretches of time. Their dance and mime performances were featured 1977-1978 on their own CBS television comedy-variety program, The Shields and Yarnell Show. They appeared on 400 national television shows in the US, including The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, The Red Skelton Show, The Muppet Show (1979), and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Career highlights included shows for two American Presidents, a command performance for Queen Elizabeth II, and a tour of China with comedian Bob Hope. They won an award as Las Vegas "Entertainer of the Year," dual Georgies for "Rising Stars of the Year" and "Special Attraction of the Year" from the American Guild of Variety Artists. She later had speaking guest appearances on The Muppet Show and Wonder Woman which both also featured Shields. Shields and Yarnell appeared together on Broadway in Broadway Follies.

Yarnell later appeared as Claudine in a 1983 outdoor production of Can-Can at The Muny in St. Louis, starring Broadway's Judy Kaye, John Reardon, John Schuck, Beth Leavel and Lawrence Leritz, her dance partner, to excellent reviews. On film, Yarnell played Dot Matrix (body acting, with Joan Rivers performing the voice) in the 1987 Mel Brooks movie Spaceballs.