Dorothy Malone, Peyton Place actress – obituary

Dorothy Malone
Dorothy Malone Credit: FILMSTILLS/ B4413

Dorothy Malone, who has died aged 93, was an Oscar-winning Hollywood actress before becoming famous on television in the 1960s as the star of Peyton Place (ITV, 1965-70), based on Grace Metalious’s bestselling novel, the first prime time American soap and the first to be screened in Britain.

Dorothy Malone and Rock Hudson on the set of The Tarnished Angels
Dorothy Malone and Rock Hudson on the set of The Tarnished Angels Credit: AP

Having received an Academy Award for her portrayal of a sexy nymphomaniac in Written on the Wind (1956), a tempestuous melodrama starring Robert Stack, Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall, she earned top billing in the equally steamy Peyton Place as Constance Mackenzie, the mother of an illegitimate daughter (Mia Farrow) living in dread of the humiliation that would fall on her if anyone discovered her guilty secret.

The sultry Dorothy Malone soon established herself as queen bee in the torrid saga of (inexplicit) sex and interwoven love affairs set in a fictional small New England town – the one television show (as the US talk show host Johnny Carson observed) that should have come sealed in a plain brown envelope.

Inspired by Granada’s Coronation Street, which had been mesmerising British audiences since 1960, Peyton Place was quickly imported by ITV which paid the American makers ABC a trifling £30,000 for the first batch of 104 episodes.

“I was the first movie star to plunge into night-time soap opera,” Dorothy Malone recalled. Even so she took the part against the advice of pessimists who warned it would be a mistake. Television was then considered Hollywood’s poor relation, the hours would be horrendous and she would suffer from overexposure.

But Dorothy Malone was so impressed with the first three Peyton Place scripts that she struck a deal with the ABC network that made her the highest-paid actress in television, settling for a pay packet of $7,000 a week (they had offered her an even fatter $10,000) provided there was no filming at weekends and she could be home by 6pm every night for dinner with her two daughters.

When she was written out of the show in 1968 after complaining that she was not given enough to do, Dorothy Malone filed a $1.6 million lawsuit for breach of contract, which was eventually settled out of court. She later reprised her Constance Mackenzie role in the made-for-television films Murder in Peyton Place (1977) and Peyton Place: The Next Generation (1985).

Dorothy Malone (foreground in blue coat) and other stars of Peyton Place
Dorothy Malone (foreground in blue coat) and other stars of Peyton Place Credit:  Cent Fox TV/REX/Shutterstock

No sooner had her film career gathered momentum than Dorothy Malone became weekly fodder for Hollywood’s gossip columnists. When one scribe reported that she was going to marry a doctor who had been her childhood sweetheart, her mother sent out the wedding invitations.

In 1952 she was briefly engaged to the actor Scott Brady, and after their relationship broke up she was romantically linked at various times to Frank Sinatra, whom she met on the set of Young At Heart (1954), the closeted gay actors Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson, the even more flamboyant pianist Liberace (even more implausibly), and the unsuccessful US presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson.

When Barbara Bel Geddes dropped out of Dallas, the 1980s super-soap in which she played Miss Ellie Ewing, the producers approached Dorothy Malone to step into the role but she turned it down.

The daughter of an auditor, she was born Dorothy Eloise Maloney on January 29 1924 in Chicago. Her family moved to Dallas, Texas, where she worked as a child model and began acting in plays at the Hockaday and Highland Park High Schools.

She was planning to become a nurse, but when a Hollywood scout saw her in a student production at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, he signed her up, starting with non-speaking parts at RKO. Her first credited role, still as Dorothy Maloney, was in The Falcon and the Co-eds (1943).

After appearing in a clutch of B-movies, many of them Westerns, she moved to Warner Bros, changed her screen name to Dorothy Malone and took a small but memorable speaking part as the demure, bespectacled bookshop assistant in Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946) who closes the shop early to canoodle with Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart).

So impressed was the studio that she was dispatched to London aboard the liner Queen Elizabeth as Warners’ emissary at the Royal Command Film Performance at the Empire, Leicester Square, where she was presented to the then Princess Elizabeth.

When Dorothy Malone’s contract with Warners ended, she continued to make B-movie Westerns such as The Man From Nevada (1950), Saddle Legion and The Bushwackers (both 1952); often, she and her stand-in would be the only women on the set.

In the Western romance Law and Order (1953), she co-starred with Ronald Reagan, but regretted not auditioning for the director William Wyler when he was casting The Big Country (1958), blaming her innate shyness and inferiority complex.

By then she had established herself as a Hollywood sex symbol as Tab Hunter’s frustrated wife in Raoul Walsh’s Battle Cry (1955). This led to her being cast as Dean Martin’s love interest in the musical comedy Artists and Models (also 1955). In the same year she was Liberace’s woman in Sincerely Yours (“He asked me out. I liked him a lot.”), and before 1955 was out had completed no fewer than seven feature films, as well as a couple of television dramas.

Dorothy Malone and Anthony Quinn collecting their best supporting actor Oscars in 1957
Dorothy Malone and Anthony Quinn collecting their best supporting actor Oscars in 1957 Credit:  AP

In 1956, transformed into a platinum blonde, Dorothy Malone’s role as a promiscuous, chain-smoking, hard-drinking oil baroness in Written on the Wind earned her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. As the Daily Telegraph’s critic noted, as bad girls go she was pretty good.

While making The Tarnished Angels (1958), an adaptation of a William Faulkner novel that reunited her with Robert Stack and Rock Hudson, she bridled at the prospect of performing the stunts required in her role as a barnstorming stunt parachute jumper and spent hours suspended above the set on wires while the crew rehearsed and technicians fiddled with the lights. She blamed the ordeal for a near-fatal blood clot that landed her in hospital for three weeks in 1965.

During the 1970s she languished in a string of forgettable films such as Abduction, about the Patty Hearst kidnapping, and The Man Who Could Not Die (both 1975). Although less visible in her later years, Dorothy Malone returned to the big screen in 1992 as a friend of Sharon Stone’s character in Basic Instinct.

She often reflected on her time in Peyton Place, and confessed that she had identified closely with her character Constance Mackenzie. “People say the series was overdone,” Dorothy Malone mused, “but after all that has happened to me in my life it reflected a great deal of reality.”

Dorothy Malone was married and divorced three times, and her second marriage, lasting only a month in 1969, to a New York investment banker, Robert Tomarkin, was annulled. In 1971 she married a Dallas motel chain executive, Charles Bell.

She had two daughters from her first marriage in 1959 to the French actor Jacques Bergerac, the former husband of Ginger Rogers.

Dorothy Malone, born January 29 1924, died January 19 2018

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