DOROTHY MALONE

(30 January 1925 - 19 January 2018)

The strikingly beautiful American actress Dorothy Malone, who has died aged 92, had a long, fifty-year career in films and television, yet without realising her true potential as an actress. Discovered by an RKO scout, she began her film career with uncredited roles in films from 1940, including Higher and Higher and Step Lively (both with Frank Sinatra), Show Business (with Eddie Cantor), and Hollywood Canteen (with Bette Davis). She was at times under contract to Warners and Universal, but her first name check came in Too Young to Know (1945) and then she appeared in Night and Day, the bowdlerised biopic about Cole Porter with Cary Grant. She made more of an impression with Bogart in The Big Sleep, playing a bookshop owner, but then spent the rest of the 1940s in minor Westerns and other programmers. Television called from 1951, but she continued in movies including Scared Stiff and Artists and Models, both with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Law and Order, Loophole, Pushover, Don Siegel’s Private Hell 36, Young at Heart with Sinatra and Doris Day, Raoul Walsh’s Battle Cry, and Sincerely Yours with Liberace, among many others. More television cropped up until she gained the best role of her film career, as Marylee Hadley in Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956), for which she won an Oscar for best supporting actress, eclipsing her co-stars Rock Hudson, Robert Stack and Lauren Bacall. Sirk also cast her in The Tarnished Angels the following year. Among the other films she made are Man of a Thousand Faces, Too Much, Too Soon, Warlock, The Last Voyage, The Last Sunset, and the iconic Beach Party. However, Dorothy Malone may well be best remembered for her portrayal of Constance Mackenzie in the TV series of Peyton Place, which ran for over 400 episodes from 1964 to 1968. Following that it was mostly television (Rich Man, Poor Man, Ironside, Ellery Queen, Police Woman, The Streets of San Francisco, etc), interspersed with the odd film such as Golden Rendezvous with Richard Harris and all-star Winter Kills, plus the inevitable horror movies. Her last film was Basic Instinct (1992). Dorothy Malone’s marriages were none too successful. Her first husband, Jacques Bergerac, actor and ex-spouse of Ginger Rogers, gave her two daughters in the five years they were married. Her match with the businessman Robert Tomarkin was annulled after four months and her final marriage to motel executive Charles Huston Bell ended in divorce after less than two years. She had three grandchildren.

MICHAEL DARVELL