Dorothy Malone
Oscar-winning actress who became famous on television as Constance Mackenzie in Peyton Place
DOROTHY MALONE, who has died aged 93, was an Oscarwinning 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.
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-fortelevision and Models Sincerely Yours Wind Battle Cry Daily Telegraph’s Artists The Tarnished Angels