This article does not cite any references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. (help, get involved!)
Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.
This article has been tagged since June 2007.
Michele Lee (born on June 24, 1942) is a Tony and Emmy-nominated American singer, dancer, actress, producer, director and frequent game show panelist of the 1970s. She is best-known for her role as Karen Cooper Fairgate MacKenzie on the 1980s prime-time soap opera, Knots Landing. She also co-starred with Dean Jones in the 1968 Disney cult classic movie, The Love Bug.
She was born as Michelle Lee Dusick of Jewish heritage in Los Angeles, California, to Jack Dusick, who was a popular makeup artist for MGM Studios during the 1950s and 1960s, and to Sylvia Dusick, who was a stay-at-home mother. She had a younger brother, who's currently a district attorney. When she was in 10th grade at Alexander Hamilton High School, she tried out for a band and served as its lead singer; at the same time, she was very popular with her class and received excellent grades. She graduated from high school in 1960. After graduation, as she began her career in show business, per her parents' wishes, she dropped the name of Dusick, and the extra l of her first name, therefore becoming Michele Lee.
Lee began her career on television in an episode of the late 1950s sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. When she was 18, she auditioned for the Broadway play Vintage '60. She soon began appearing in musicals, becoming a star on Broadway at the age of 19 in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in the role of "Rosemary", opposite Robert Morse and the late Rudy Vallee, a role she reprised in the film version. She also appeared in more plays, such as the Los Angeles production of Parade and the Broadway productions of Bravo Giovanni and The Tale of the Allergist's Wife .
In addition to starring in Broadway plays, she also made guest appearances on a number of variety and game shows, making her debut on an episode of The Danny Kaye Show in 1963. This part led to another guest appearance on an episode of The Carol Burnett Show. As her popularity grew in the late 1960s, she was also a recording artist signed to Columbia Records. Between 1967 & 1968, she recorded 2 separate albums per year. The first album she recorded was A Taste of the Fantastic which was followed by L. David Sloane. She sang mostly in nightclubs and traveled to the famous Persian Room in New York and the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas.
After she sang and starred in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967), she became known for her roles in the films The Love Bug (1968), and The Comic (1969). Lee’s movie The Love Bug became the biggest blockbuster movie of 1969. That same year, she starred in a special television production of the Jerome Kern - Otto Harbach musical, Roberta, in which she sang Smoke Gets In Your Eyes. After the birth of her son, she worked infrequently until accepting a role on Broadway in Seesaw, which netted her a Tony Award nomination in 1974. After her mother's death, she stopped working, wanting to spend time with her only son.
In addition to becoming a singer, Lee became one of the most in-demand guest actresses of the 1970s, appearing in an episode of: Marcus Welby, M.D.. The part led to other roles such as: Alias Smith and Jones, Night Gallery, Love, American Style, Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, and Disneyland, in which she reprised her role in the popular 1960s movie, The Love Bug.
Lee's name would proved to be even more prominent by making numerous appearances on several game shows in the 1970s, such as: Hollywood Squares, Match Game, Celebrity Sweepstakes, This Is Your Life, The Movie Game, The $25,000 Pyramid, What's My Line, The Gong Show, Snap Judgment, among many others. She appeared on a pilot of a trashy 1970s game show, Cop-Out that have never been aired.
In 1979, Lee accepted an acting job after a three-year sabbatical, the leading role in Knots Landing, a spinoff of the immensely-popular, Dallas. On Knots, Lee was cast as feisty matriarch Karen Fairgate MacKenzie. Her co-stars on the show were familiar character actors Joan Van Ark and Ted Shackelford, who played Karen's best friends and neighbors, Val and Gary Ewing, who had both guest-starred on several episodes of its parent show, Dallas. The first season episodes did not receive high ratings, but CBS continued to support the show and it took off during its second season in 1980, when actress Donna Mills came on to the show as Karen's wicked sister-in-law, Abby Fairgate Cunningham.
Although Lee was having great success, her marriage to actor James Farentino was failing. She and Farentino divorced at around the same time Lee's onscreen husband, Don Murray left the show. Lee thus played a single mother on Knots at the same time she was becoming one in real-life. In 2005, Lee revealed that when her character took off her wedding ring in 1983, after a year of mourning, Lee was taking off her real life wedding band.
After Lee and Farentino divorced in 1983, she met Fred Rappaport at a party. They were married in 1987. During the fall of 1982, her character met M. Patrick "Mack" MacKenzie (Kevin Dobson), who became her television husband a year later. They would continue working together until the end of the series. As one of the leads, Lee became very popular with fans, winning the Soap Opera Digest Award for Lead Actress five times, and being nominated for an Emmy Award in 1982 for "Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series." In 1983, the writers/producers of Knots Landing urged her to do a storyline based on drug dependency. She hated the script, but agreed to do the storyline. Six years later, Lee directed her first episode and continued to do so until the series ended. Lee's co-star Van Ark has publicly praised her directing skills. In 1990, Knots Landing reached a milestone with 300 episodes in the can, being second only to its parent soap, Dallas. During the 12th season, Michele Lee wrote her favorite scene from the series which is known as the "Pollyanna Speech" among fans. In this scene, the character explains how she would like to be a pollyanna, but cannot be due to the world around her.
As Knots moved into the 1990s, its popularity began to wane. The big budget that the series once had was trimmed; in the final season, the higher paid cast members were asked to appear in only 15 of the season's 19 episodes, as the budget constraints had become so that the production company couldn't afford to pay them. Lee refused and appeared in all 19 episodes that season, doing her extra four for union scale. This allowed Lee to appear in all 344 episodes of the series: a record that has not been broken by any other actress in a primetime drama to date.
Knots Landing ended in 1993. Lee has since appeared in many made-for-TV movies, including a biopic of late country star Dottie West ( Big Dreams and Broken Hearts: The Dottie West Story) and the Knots Landing reunion special, Knots Landing: Back to the Cul-de-Sac. In 1996, she became the first woman to star in, direct, and produce a TV movie for Lifetime, Color Me Perfect. In 1998 Lee portrayed Hollywood novelist Jacqueline Susann in the television biopic Scandalous Me: The Jacqueline Susann Story. In 2004, she returned to feature films in the role of Ben Stiller's mother in Along Came Polly. She guest-starred alongside Chita Rivera in a February 2005 episode of Will & Grace. She and her son relocated to New York.
In 1963, she met actor James Farentino on the set of the theatrical play, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and in 1964 they were married. Their son David Farentino was born July 6, 1969. She lost her father Jack Dusick in 1970 from a massive heart attack. In 1976, she lost her mother, Sylvia Dusick.
