Marie McDonald (July 6, 1923 – October 21, 1965) was an American singer and actress.
Born Cora Marie Frye in Burgin, Kentucky, she was the daughter of a Ziegfeld Follies girl who divorced Frye's father when she was a child. She eventually moved with her mother and stepfather to Yonkers, New York. Frye originally wanted to pursue a career in journalism but her mother encouraged her to go into show business. She competed in numerous beauty pageants including Miss America. In her early teens, Frye began doing modeling work and was signed by the prominent John Robert Powers Agency in New York City. Nicknamed "The Body" because of her shapely physique, she was only seventeen years old when she landed a showgirl role in a 1940 Broadway production at the Earl Carroll Theatre called Earl Carroll's Vanities. Shortly thereafter, she moved to Hollywood hoping to develop a career in show business. She continued to work for the owner of the Broadway theatre as a showgirl at his Sunset Boulevard nightclub.
Marie McDonald's singing voice brought work with Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra on his radio show and she later performed with other Big bands. Seen as a multi-talented young star, in 1942 she was put under contract by Universal Studios and immediately appeared in several minor roles. The following year she co-starred in A Scream in the Dark, a "B" detective mystery for Republic Pictures that met with reasonable success. However, that would be it as far as starring roles until 1945 when she worked for a small independent production company in another "B" film called Getting Gertie's Garter. She costarred with Gene Kelly in MGM's Living in a Big Way (1947).
During the Second World War, McDonald was a volunteer pin-up girl for the United States military magazine, YANK. She had married for the first time in 1940 but this marriage quickly ended. Her second marriage, to her agent Vic Orsatti, lasted four years. In all, she married seven times, including twice to Harry Karl, who later married and bankrupted Debbie Reynolds. She also had a torrid affair with gangster Bugsy Siegel.
Her personal life was thrown into turmoil by her addictions to alcohol and prescription drugs. She was arrested for drunk driving and later attempted suicide. In 1957, she made headlines by faking her own kidnapping. Between 1945 and 1950 she appeared in only two films and then again not until 1958 when she was cast in a slapstick comedy opposite Jerry Lewis in The Geisha Boy . Eight years later the 40-year-old McDonald made her last appearance in a "spicy" film, Promises! Promises!, that featured a topless Jayne Mansfield.
In 1965, at Calabasas, California, the 42-year-old ended her own life with a drug overdose. She was put to rest in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. It is unclear whether McDonald committed suicide or whether her death was accidental. Never regaining his balance after the shock of Marie's death, her producer husband Donald F. Taylor, who had occasionally acted under the name Don Taylor, committed suicide in January 1966. Marie's three children were raised by Harry Karl and his new wife, Debbie Reynolds.
