Background
Malone, Dorothy was born on January 30, 1925 in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
Malone, Dorothy was born on January 30, 1925 in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
Educated at Hockaday School, and Highland Park High School.
She came into the movies during the war in small roles in Falcon and the Co-Eds (43, William Clemens), One Mysterious Night (44, Budd Boettieher), Shoiv Business (44, Edwin L. Marin), and Hollywood Canteen (45, Delmer Dayes), but her first impact was in Hawks’s The Big Sleep (46), letting dowm her hair, removing her glasses, and shutting up shop while she entertained Bogart one thundery afternoon. She was always a bonus, never a star, and seldom used to the full, hut quickly looking more mature than her age, soulful and lived in, a great lady of the B picture.
She soon outgrew ingenues: Curtizs Night and Day (46); Two Guys from Texas (48, David Butler); Walsh’s One Sunday Afternoon (49) and Colorado Territory (49); Daves s To the Victor (48); South of St. Louis (49, Ray Enright); The Nevadan (50, Gordon Douglas); Quine’s Pushover (54); Siegel's Private Hell 36 (54); Young at Heart (55, Douglas); Battle Cry (55, Walsh), with one splendid erotic moment when she undresses in an armchair; Corman’s Five Guns West (55); especially brazen for Douglas Sirk as the headstrong sister in Written on the Wind (56), for which she won a supporting actress Oscar; and The Tarnished Angels (57) as a parachutist, wife, mother, and lover. Sirk’s films demand self-belief in players, and Malone steered her wanton women past absurdity by sheer languorous conviction. She was also in Pillars of the Sky (56, George Marshall); Tension at Table Rock (56, Charles Marquis Warren); Man of a Thousand Faces (57, Joseph Pevney); Tip on a Dead Jockey (57, Richard Thorpe); as Diana Barrymore in Too Much, Too Soon (58, Art Napoleon); Warlock (59, Edward Dmytryk); horribly trapped throughout The Last Voyage (60, Andrew L. Stone); and The Last Sunset (61, Robert Aldrich). She then went into TV for Peyton Place, hut has been seen in Gli Insaziabili (69, Alberto de Martino); Abduction (75, Joseph Zito); The November Plan (76, Don Medford); Golden Rendezvous (77, Ashley Lazarus); Winter Kills (79, William Richert); The Day Time Ended (80, John Cardos); Good Luck. Miss Wyckoff (79, Marvin J. Chomskv); Condominium (80, Sidney Hvers); The Being (83, Jackie Kong); He’s Not Your Son (84, Don Taylor); Peyton Place: The Next Generation (85. Larry Elikann); and Rest in Peace (86, Joseph Braunstein).
Then, after a few years away, she returned briefly as a sad-eyed but polite veteran of murder in Basic Instinct (92, Paul Verhoeven), one of the few understated things in that picture, and thus all the more tempting—if only the movie could have gone off with her.
Member Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of television and Radio Artists.