We remember his brilliant scene with Humphrey Bogart in The Eternal Sleep
Actress Dorothy Malone died at the age of 92. She was one of the great female movie stars of the 50s and 60s. The fans will remember her as a sensual platinum blonde, with an angular face, but also as an actress of remarkable talent, who made brilliant performances with directors such as Douglas Sirk (in Written on the Wind, who even won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, and Angels without brilliance), Raoul Walsh (Together to the Death and Beyond Tears) or Robert Aldrich (The Lastard) and Robert Aldrich. He also worked on Paul Verhoeven's famous movie Basic Instinct, where he brought the mother of the character who played Sharon Stone to life.
But when Dorothy jumped to fame, she hadn't changed her hair color yet. It was in 1946, in The Eternal Dream, legendary classic film noir classic directed by Howard Hawks, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The actress appears rabidly beautiful in a funny sequence in a library next to Bogart. The scene was not in Raymond Chandler's original novel on which the film is based, nor in the script. As Hawks recalled in his biography: "We improvise it as we go along. And we shot it only because the girl was damned beautiful and had a huge talent.
And we didn't want this other mythical scene from his filmography either. It belongs to Dull Angels, a superb film by Douglas Sirk about a family who make a living doing aerial acrobatics. The scene in which Dorothy's character parachuted in a dress and skirt has also come down to the annals of classic cinema.