Dorothy Malone (born January 30, 1925) is an Academy Award-winning American actress.
Malone was born Dorothy Eloise Maloney in Chicago, Illinois. The family moved to Dallas, Texas, where she worked as a child model and began acting in school plays at Ursuline Convent and Highland Park High School. While performing at Southern Methodist University, she was spotted by a talent agent for RKO and was signed to a studio contract, making her film debut in 1943 in The Falcon and the Co-Eds.
Much of Malone's early career was spent in supporting roles in B-movies, many of them Westerns, although on occasion she had the opportunity to play small but memorable roles, such as that of a brainy, lusty, bespectacled bookstore clerk in The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart in 1946, and the love interest of Dean Martin in the 1955 musical-comedy Artists and Models.
In 1956, Malone transformed herself into a platinum blonde and shed her good girl-image to co-star with Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, and Robert Stack in director Douglas Sirk's melodrama Written on the Wind. Her portrayal of the dipso-nymphomaniac daughter of a Texas oil baron won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. As a result, she was offered meatier roles in better films, including Too Much, Too Soon, in which she portrayed Diana Barrymore, Man of a Thousand Faces (with James Cagney), and Warlock (with Henry Fonda and Richard Widmark). Additional screen credits include The Tarnished Angels (in which she reunited with former co-stars Hudson and Stack and director Sirk), The Last Voyage (with Stack) and The Last Sunset (with Hudson).
Malone became a household name when she accepted the lead role of Constance MacKenzie on the ABC primetime serial Peyton Place, on which she starred from 1964 through 1968. She had a featured role in the 1976 miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man. Her last notable screen appearance came as as a mother convicted of murdering her family in Basic Instinct (1992) opposite Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone.
Malone was married and divorced three times and has two daughters, Mimi and Diane, from her first marriage to actor Jacques Bergerac. Her star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame is located at 1718 Vine.
