2018 Archives

Dorothy Malone, SMU alum and Academy Award winner, has died

Excerpt

The following is from the Jan. 19, 2018, edition of The New York Times. Dorothy Malone attended SMU in the 1940s and was SMU’s first alumna to win an Academy Award.

January 22, 2018

 By Anita Gates

Dorothy MaloneDorothy Malone, the sultry blond actress who won an Academy Award for playing an unapologetically bad girl in “Written on the Wind” and found television stardom as a repentant one on “Peyton Place,” died on Friday in Dallas. She was 93.

Her daughter Mimi Vanderstraaten confirmed the death.

Ms. Malone was 31 and had been in Hollywood for 13 years when she was cast as Marylee Hadley, a spoiled, sex-crazed young Texas oil heiress, in “Written on the Wind” (1956). The film, directed by Douglas Sirk, Hollywood’s master of glossy melodrama, also starred Rock Hudson and Robert Stack.

The three starred again together two years later in Sirk’s drama “Tarnished Angels,” in which a reporter (Mr. Hudson) falls for the sultry wife (Ms. Malone) of a barnstorming pilot (Mr. Stack).  . . . 

Dorothy Eloise Maloney was born on Jan. 30, 1924, in Chicago and grew up in Dallas, one of five children of Robert Ignatius Maloney and the former Esther Smith. ... Ms. Malone attended Southern Methodist University, where an RKO talent agent saw her in a 1943 school production and soon whisked her away to Hollywood. She was accompanied by her mother.

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