Chicago- born actress won Oscar, was in ‘ Peyton Place’
DALLAS— Actress Dorothy Malone, who won hearts of 1960s television viewers as the long- suffering mother in the nighttime soap “Peyton Place,” died Friday in Dallas at age 92.
Ms. Malone died in an assisted living center from natural causes days before her 94th birthday, said her daughter, Mimi Vanderstraaten.
After 11 years of mostly roles as loving sweethearts and wives, the brunette actress decided she needed to gamble on her career instead of playing it safe. She fired her agent, hired a publicist, dyed her hair blonde and sought a new image.
“I came up with a conviction that most of the winners in this business became stars overnight by playing shady dames with sex appeal,” she recalled in 1967. She welcomed the offer for “Written on the Wind,” in which she played an alcoholic nymphomaniac who tries to steal Rock Hudson from his wife, Lauren Bacall.
“And I’ve been unfaithful or drunk or oversexed almost ever since — on the screen, of course,” she added.
When Jack Lemmon announced her as the winner of the 1956 Academy Award for best actress in a supporting role for the performance, she rushed to the stage of the Pantages Theatre and gave the longest speech of the evening.
Ms. Malone’s career waned after she reached 40, but she achieved her widest popularity with “Peyton Place,” the 1964- 69 ABC series based on Grace Metalious’ steamy novel which became a hit 1957 movie starring Lana Turner. Ms. Malone assumed the Turner role as Constance Mackenzie, the bookshop operator who harbored a dark secret about the birth of her daughter Allison, played by the 19- year- old Mia Farrow.
Ms. Malone was offered a salary of $ 10,000 aweek, huge money at the time. She settled for $ 7,000 with the proviso that she could leave the set at 5 p. m. so she could spend time with her young daughters, Mimi and Diane. She had been divorced from their father, a dashing Frenchman, Jacques Bergerac.
Malone married three times — 2 ½ by her calculation. Her second marriage, to stock broker Robert Tomarkin in 1969, was annulled after six weeks, Vanderstraaten said. A marriage in 1971 to motel chain executive Huston Bell also ended in divorce.
“I don’t have very good luck in men,” she admitted. “I had a tendency to endow a man qualities he did not possess.”
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.