RIP Dorothy Malone

When I began my movie-going journey in the fifties, Dorothy Malone was frequently along for the ride.  I think I've seen just about every movie she ever made.  Truthfully it wasn't always her who was the draw but rather her films.  A great number in those days were westerns and there simply weren't too many I missed.

And actually I was watching one a couple of weeks ago, The Last Sunset (1961), where she is married to cattleman Joseph Cotten and while driving a big herd to sale, she has Rock Hudson and Kirk Douglas competing for her favors.  It was a good oater and a good role for her.  I knew she was still alive but wondered how old she was so I looked it up.  Hmmm, 92, I said to myself, will probably be reading something about her soon.  And now I have.  Kinda creepy.

One of the memorable things about Malone was that she famously changed her hair color after 30 or so movies as a brunette and as a blonde acquired a whole new career.  With her dark tresses she usually was the good girl, the dutiful wife, but as a blonde her roles were often more daring, sexy and leading lady fare.  Hollywood was so stunned at the transformation, it gave her an Oscar.

While born in Chicago (in 1925), she moved with her family, with whom she was always close, to Dallas.  She was not a girl who dreamed of acting and the bright lights of Hollywood or Broadway... she just knew she was destined to be a nurse.  From childhood to last Friday, she was a caring person.  Decency was important to her... a flaw might have been that she trusted too easily.  Motherhood came to her later in life but it was by far her favorite role.

As a teen, she took on some modeling chores... she had a lovely, kind face with big doe eyes and a hearty smile.  Modeling may have helped her overcome a certain timidity and it led to a part in a local play.  As I've typed in these pages many a time, some Hollywood agent, there to scout out another actor, was impressed with Malone.  Six weeks later an RKO contract arrived in the mail.

Her name was changed.  The last name was Maloney... she was told it sounded too much like baloney and had to go.  After working in a number of lesser RKO productions, she got on with Warner Brothers where, again, most of her work was in B movies... often westerns or inane comedies... and usually she was not the leading lady.  She worked with some big names, particularly at Warner's, and learned her craft.  She was never particularly ambitious but always glad to take what work she could get.

Her career gathered momentum with a small role in the acclaimed 1946 film noir, The Big Sleep.  Noir buffs remember her as the clerk at the Acme Bookshop where she takes off her glasses, unpins her hair and purrs to Humphrey Bogart/Phillip Marlowe that the store is closing early.  She figures later in the sinister story as well.

She made multiple westerns with Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott and was the mousy brunette who supported dishy blondes Virginia Mayo and Lizabeth Scott.  Malone left Warners and popped into Paramount for a few.  All young actresses at that studio in those days ended up in a Martin & Lewis film and Malone made two... Scared Stiff (1953) and Artists and Models (1955).  

The fifties was her decade,  I had her scheduled for my upcoming tribute to it but she beat me to it.  She made 32 movies (and a number of television shows) in the 50's but still was a B film staple.  Pushover, a tense 1954 noir about a cop on the take, is a good one but unfortunately it was Kim Novak's glamorous debut and Malone, still in her brunette good girl phase, didn't stand a chance.  Shortly thereafter, Malone turned blonde to play Doris Day's sister in Young at Heart (1954). 

She didn't go unnoticed in the large cast of Battle Cry (1955), an immensely popular war film that highlighted soldiers' romances as much as it did the fighting.  Malone was a rather eager, lonely widow sharing a brief romance with Tab Hunter.  That same year she made the mostly unintentionally funny Sincerely Yours, where Liberace, of all people, thought he loved her.  The following year she was caught between Jeff Chandler and Keith Andes in a colorful, routine western, Pillars of the Sky.

Written on the Wind (1956), directed by the superbly-talented Douglas Sirk, became the best role Dorothy Malone ever had.  Playing Marylee Hadley, the dipso-nymphomaniac daughter of an oil baron, was a boon for the actress.  She'd never played a role with such reckless abandon.  She popped out of a niche for her... playing characters who seem to hold back a part of themselves.  They were basically withdrawn and might break out with some sparky words but then retreat back into themselves again.  That changed with Written on the Wind and this blonde temptress became a more physical actress...  undulating, feverish, eyes flashing.  The role would win her an Oscar for best supporting actress.  She was quick to say it was the most fun she ever had on a film set.  She was especially happy she became good friends with her two leading men, Rock Hudson and Robert Stack.  And she would work with each of them twice more.

She had a good role as the sad, broken first wife of actor Lon Chaney (James Cagney) in 1957's Man of a Thousand Faces.  With Jane Greer as the second wife and a Hollywood backdrop, this was a good film to me.  Then Malone joined up again with Hudson and Stack in The Tarnished Angels, a period tale of daredevil pilots.  It was better than the critics thought it was.  

She had been a bachelor girl for a long time and often photographed on the arm of some actor, frequently a costar.  She served as a beard on many a date with gay friends and costars as well.  I saw her once at a restaurant with John Ireland.  She had a longer romance with Scott Brady.  In 1958 she settled down when she fell for a French wannabe actor, Jacques Bergerac, who was desperate to become an American star.  He used a former costar,  Ginger Rogers, as a stepping stone, particularly after they married.

She went back to being a brunette for the last time to portray fallen actress, Diana Barrymore, in a film based on her memoir, Too Much, Too Soon (1958).  Malone wasn't the first choice for the role but by and large it was Written on the Wind's Marylee Hadley at the end of her rope.  I thought she did what she could but Barrymore's harsh story was too watered-down by the Production Code and the film was not the hoped-for success.

Her last movie of the 50's was as the bitter ex-lover of Anthony Quinn in the western, Warlock (1959).  It was expected to be a big hit, too, especially with Richard Widmark and Henry Fonda also in the cast, but it fell to a B+ rating.

With Robert Stack in The Last Voyage

Two good films came her way at the beginning of the 60's.  Oddly, both have last in the title.  I mentioned The Last Sunset at the start here, her last film with her buddy Hudson.  Her last outing with her other buddy, Stack, was the year before, The Last Voyage, a nail-biter with Malone being trapped in the wreckage of a ship about to sink.  

Sinking is pretty much what happened to her movie career.  She likely didn't give it two thoughts because she married Bergerac in Hong Kong while making Voyage.  They may have  started off well but the dazzling-looking couple, despite having two daughters, called it off  by 1964.  Their bitter divorce and custody battle (which she won) was tabloid fodder for some time. 

She enjoyed her life with her daughters more than she perhaps thought she would and as a result, quickie guest-star roles on television appealed to her far more than long movie shoots.  The sad truth (for fans) was her leading-lady days in films were over.

As she looked in Peyton Place

In 1964 she acquired a role that would become as famous for her as that in Written on the Wind.  She began work in the first nighttime soap opera, Peyton Place.  Astonishingly it was on three nights a week for a while.  Malone, as Constance MacKenzie, headed a large, ever-evolving cast.  She played the role that Lana Turner had played in the popular movie.  The TV show was a phenomenal success for several years.

It was not, however, an entirely happy experience for Malone.  She was out for a brief period when blood clots were discovered on her lungs, requiring surgery.  She had a fight with the producers over her dwindling role, feeling rightfully that her younger costars, particularly Mia Farrow, Ryan O'Neal and Barbara Parkins, had their screen times increased.  The truth is, of course, that they were primarily the reason viewers tuned in.  In 1968 she and her screen husband, Tim O'Connor, were written out of the series.  She sued 20th Century Fox and the suit was settled out of court.  When some TV movies on the series were later filmed, Malone was back.

She spent the next two dozen years doing an assortment of things, the most prominent being the popular miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man (1976), appearing in three segments.  She spent a great deal of time back in Dallas caring for her ailing parents.  Happily, her daughters also lived there.  In 1992 she had a bit part as a murderess in Basic Instinct.  She never worked as an actress again.  There were two more brief, unfortunate marriages.

She died of natural causes on Friday in Dallas.  She had been in poor health for several years and lived in a nursing home. Farrow tweeted RIP Dorothy Malone, my beautiful TV mom for two amazing years.


I always thought she delivered.  She was decorative, yes, but she was more than that.  Malone's performances were sincere, her smiles plentiful and she made me feel somehow comfortable.  Most of her films weren't mentioned here, so many of them less than stellar.  But there she was... always selling it.  I've long been pleased I bought.


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