Obituary: Dorothy Malone

For the past month or so, I have been binge watching the 1960s prime time soap Peyton Place.    Today I was made aware that the star of this serial, at least one of the main stars of the soap, Oscar-winning actress Dorothy Malone, has died.  She was 93.  According to the article, she had died of natural causes at an assisted living center.  She died just days short of her 94th birthday.

One of her "trademarks" in the show was her hair.  She was blond, with her hair in a flip with hardly a hair out of place.  That is because her "hair" was reportedly  a wig.  She played Constance Mackenzie, the unwed mother of Mia Farrow's character Allison, and ran a bookstore in the little "New England" town of Peyton Place despite the fact the cars on the show had California license plates.  Malone's character did marry Allison's father, Elliot Carson (played by Tim O'Connor, an actor still alive and in his nineties) later in the first season.  Carson served 18 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit.  He later became the editor of what appeared to be a one-person newspaper after the editor/owner of the paper decided to "leave" the show and narrate the proceedings throughout the run of the series.

I am now on about episode 150 of the show.  It is on YouTube.  I would like to buy the series one of these days on DVD.  It is actually very good.  Malone later left the series before the end of its run when she complained she didn't have enough to do.

She won the Oscar for best actress for her performance in Written on the Wind.

From the link:

When she was born in Chicago on Jan. 30, 1925, her name was Dorothy Eloise Maloney (it was changed to Malone in Hollywood "because it sounded too much like baloney," she said). When she was 3-months-old, her father — a telephone company auditor — moved the family to Dallas where she was raised in a strict Catholic household.

"As a child I lived by the rules," she said in 1967, "repeating them over and over, abiding by them before I fully understood their full meaning."

In 1942, an RKO talent scout saw her in a play at Southern Methodist University and recommended her for a studio contract. Her first three movie roles were walk-ons with no lines; her later roles were not much improvement. A move to Warner Bros. in 1945 provided greater opportunity.

In her first film at Warners, The Big Sleep, she was cast as a bookshop clerk who is questioned by Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart). She closes the shop, lets her hair down, takes off her glasses and seduces the private eye in a shelter from a thunderstorm. Her other films at the studio were less provocative. They included Night and Day, One Sunday Afternoon, Colorado Territory, Young at Heart and Battle Cry.