Dorothy Malone

Dorothy Malone
Studio publicity photo, 1956
Born	Dorothy Eloise Maloney (1925-01-30) January 30, 1925 (age 92) Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1943–1992
Spouse(s)	Jacques Bergerac (m. 1959–1964; divorced) Robert Tomarkin (m. 1969–1969; annulled) Charles Huston Bell (m. 1971–1974; divorced)
Children	Mimi Esther Therese Bergerac (b. 1960) Diane Alice Bergerac (b. 1962)

Dorothy Malone (born January 30, 1925) is an American actress. Her film career began in 1943, and in her early years she played small roles, mainly in B-movies. After a decade in films, she began to acquire a more glamorous image, particularly after her performance in Written on the Wind (1956), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Her film career reached its peak by the beginning of the 1960s, and she achieved later success with her television role as Constance MacKenzie on Peyton Place from 1964 to 1968. Less active in her later years, Malone returned to films in 1992 as the friend of Sharon Stone's character in Basic Instinct.

She is one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Malone was born Dorothy Eloise Maloney in Chicago. Her family moved to Dallas, Texas, where she worked as a child model and began acting in school plays. She attended Ursuline Convent, the Hockaday School, and Highland Park High School. While performing at Southern Methodist University, she was spotted by an RKO talent agent and was signed to a studio contract, making her film debut in 1943 in Gildersleeve on Broadway in an uncredited role, and shortly after appeared in The Falcon and the Co-eds, credited as Dorothy Maloney.

Much of Malone's early career was spent in supporting roles in B-movies, many of them Westerns, although on occasion she played small but memorable roles, such as the brainy, lusty, bespectacled bookstore clerk in The Big Sleep (1946) with Humphrey Bogart, and the love interest of Dean Martin in the musical-comedy Artists and Models (1955).