Winner of an Oscar for 'Written in the wind', also participated in 'The eternal dream' and 'Artists and models'.
Deserving of the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her creation of Marylee Hadley in Written in the Wind (1956), one of the great melodramas of Douglas Sirk in Technicolor of yesteryear, the place that Dorothy Malone occupies in Olympus cinephile is a point imprecise between the western of the 50 and the universe of Sirk himself. Being as it was one of the great blondes of the Hollywood of the 50 - to the right of Lana Turner in that imaginary of Sirk-, it does not stop being curious that, in the black cinema, where it was released, it never got to stand out. Older American viewers will remember Dorothy as the Constance MacKenzie of Pleyton Place (1964-1969), one of the pivotal series in the history of television in her country. But film buffs around the world still admire her in her role as LaVerne Shumann, the girl who plays life with her aerial acrobatics in Dull Angels (Douglas Sirk, 1957), and her love between her pilot husband, Roger Shumann (Robert Stack) and the journalist Burke Devlin (Rock Hudson).
Although she looked like a Texan, she was not. Dorothy Malone was born in Chicago in 1930, she was still a little girl when her parents moved to Dallas. And there, in the most prominent city in the state of the lonely star, she was still a teenager who studied with the Ursulines when she began to stand out as a model. Not long after, during a theatrical performance at the University Highland Park School, she was discovered by an RKO agent.
After several years of minor tapes, it was noted for the first time as the bookstore that lends a hand to Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) in The eternal dream (Howard Hawks, 1946). She was still naive and dark. That was the first cast that Dorothy shared with Lauren Bacall. What followed were several westerns of series B. A stretch of his filmography that ends with Together until death (1949). Already marooned, in this heartbreaking masterpiece of the great Raoul Walsh - it was a western-style remake of The Last Refuge (Raoul Walsh, 1941) -, Dorothy went to record how accurately she could see the evil by playing the first time. your villains.
Nothing to do with the delicious collaborations of the actress in the musical comedies in the service of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in which he participated. An inheritance of fear (George Marshall, 1953) was the first of them. The following, Artists and models (Frank Tahslin, 1955) again raised Dorothy to one of the great Technicolor titles. By that time, the interpreter was already one of the platinum blondes that set the tone in Hollywood while falling in love with the hardest cowboys in the western. In fact, it was the girl of Five Pistols (1955), the debut in the performance of the great Roger Corman. Thus the brave die (Alfred L. Werker, 1955), The Columns of Heaven (George Marshall, 1956) and The Man with the Golden Pistols (Edward Dmytryk, 1959), were some of those titles. The last dusk (Robert Aldrich, 1961), where he played one of his most complex women-he had to deal with his former lover, who flirted with the daughter they both fathered-was the last great western on which Dorothy Malone rode.