Glamorous red-haired beauty of Hollywood in 1940s-’50s

Arlene Dahl, a flamehaired Hollywood actress, beauty products entrepreneur and syndicated columnist whose dramatic offscreen life included tempestuous marriages to actors Lex Barker and Fernando Lamas and a climb back from bankruptcy, died Monday at her home in New York City. Shewas 96.

Her son, actor Lorenzo Lamas, announced the death on Facebook but did not specify thecause.

With alabaster skin and a signature beauty mark near her upper lip, Ms. Dahl was a made-for-Technicolor actress who enjoyed a steady career in musical comedies, period pieces and romantic dramas in the late 1940s and ’50s.

None of her films, bearing such titles as “Desert Legion” (1953), “Sangaree” (1953) and “Slightly Scarlet” (1956), remotely registered as classics, and Ms. Dahl had little illusion about her screen legacy. Byher own estimation, many of her films were “an embarrassment.”

She was a decorative presence in a vast majority of her credits, exuding an effortless glamour, as if she had floated off the glossy pages of Harper’s Bazaar. She appeared only sporadically in films after 1960, having transitioned to a second career marketing her own line of lingerie and other boudoir merchandise and writing a syndicated column called “Let’sBe Beautiful.”

As a starlet, she was courted by a rich but disheveled young congressman, John F. Kennedy. “He was charming, articulate and attractive,” she told People magazine, “but every time I saw himhe looked like an unmade bed. He had no fashion sense untilhe married Jackie.”

Her first marriage — to Barker, who played Tarzan in the movies — lasted less than a year. His raging temper, she said, doomed the marriage.

Her subsequent union with Lamas, the Argentineborn screen heartthrob, was undermined by his machismo, including a demand that she give up her career. She later married and divorced oilman Christian Holmes III, Russian-born wine authority Alexis Lichine (“a terrific temper, even worse than Fernando’s”), and TV producer-cum-yacht broker Rounsevelle“Skip” Schaum.

Her sixth and final marriage, in 1984, was to Marc Rosen, a perfume executive 18 years her junior. “Arlene was very concerned about the age difference, but not me, ever,” Mr. Rosen told People. “She needs someone youngerto keep up with her.”