Doris Dowling; Independent obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Forties star known for her complicated private life
24 June 2004
Doris Dowling, actress: born Detroit 15 May 1923;
married 1952 Artie Shaw (one son; marriage dissolved 1956),
1956 Robert Blumofe (marriage dissolved 1959), 1960 Leonard
Kaufman; died Los Angeles 18 June 2004.
A striking brunette with soulful eyes and a deep voice, the
actress Doris Dowling had prominent roles in two major films
of the Forties, Billy Wilder's Oscar-winning The Lost
Weekend (1945) and the Raymond Chandler-scripted thriller
The Blue Dahlia (1946). She was also Wilder's lover for
several years, and later became the seventh of the
bandleader Artie Shaw's eight wives.
She acted for most her life in movies, theatre and
television, but her finest role was in the acclaimed Italian
film and international hit Riso Amoro (1949: Bitter Rice,
1950) in which she was both tough and vulnerable as a girl
hopelessly in love with a rogue.
Doris Dowling was born in 1923 in Detroit. During her early
career in the theatre she was part of a now legendary chorus
line-up in Cole Porter's Panama Hattie (1940) that included
such future stars as June Allyson, Vera-Ellen, Betsy Blair
and Doris's sister Constance. Shelley Winters, also getting
her start in New York at the same time, recalled later that
she and the Dowlings were part of a fun-loving group of
girls, and they remained friends throughout the years. Other
Broadway shows in which Doris appeared were Banjo Eyes
(1941) starring Eddie Cantor, Beat the Band (1942) and New
Faces of 1943 (1942).
In 1945 she followed her sister (who had already established
a career in films) to Hollywood, where she was given a
contract by Selznick International but no assignments. She
later recounted how she learned about her first film role:
One day Billy Wilder and I were lunching at Lucey's with
Charles Jackson, who wrote the novel The Lost Weekend
[1944]. He said it was too bad I wasn't a more common type
so that I could play Gloria. And Billy never even looked up.
He just said, "She is." That's all. Just, "She is." I almost
went crazy with excitement.
As the bar-room prostitute from whom an alcoholic (Ray
Milland) borrows money to buy liquor, she gave a performance
that several reviewers tipped as a possible Oscar contender.
She next played in George Marshall's The Blue Dahlia,
starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, in the unsympathetic
role of the dissolute, promiscuous wife of a returned war
veteran (Ladd). Wearing a form-hugging lamé evening dress,
she informs her husband that their son died in a motor
accident caused by her own drunken driving. When she becomes
a murder victim, Ladd is the obvious suspect and has to
prove his innocence.
Though both films were hits, Dowling's career failed to
ignite, and both she and her sister became better known for
their private lives. The affair between Doris and the
married Wilder was an open secret, as was a similar romance
between Constance and the director Elia Kazan. Wilder
separated from his first wife in 1945 and they were divorced
in 1947. His affair with Dowling continued throughout these
years, but he later claimed he never intended to marry her.
Dowling's uncredited appearance as a Tyrolean maiden in
Wilder's The Emperor Waltz (1948) was to be her last
association with the director.
The film career of Constance Dowling floundered when the
producer Sam Goldwyn, who had starred her opposite Danny
Kaye in Up in Arms (1945), abandoned plans to promote her
when he discovered Virginia Mayo. Her affairs with Kazan
and, later, the actor Helmut Dantine, ended, so in 1948 the
sisters decided to go to Europe, where, according to Kazan,
they were "admired and happy". (Constance became the lover
of the poet Cesare Pavese, who committed suicide when she
ended their relationship. She returned to the United States
where she married a film producer, had two sons, then died
of a brain haemorrhage in 1969, at the age of 47.)
Doris had the finest role of her career after the director
Giuseppe de Santis told her that if she could brush up her
Italian she could be the star of his film Riso Amoro. In
this low-budget but beautifully photographed melodrama she
played a jewel thief's girlfriend, hiding out among the
"Mondinas", the female rice workers who toil in the Po
Valley. Dowling and her co-stars Vittorio Gassman and Raf
Vallone gave fine, intense performances, but the film was
stolen by the stunning screen début of Silvana Mangano,
whose voluptuous image in clinging sweater, torn nylons and
short shorts became iconic and paved the way for the
emergence of such stars as Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia
Loren.
Along with actual workers, paid as extras, Dowling and
Magnano spent hours waist-deep in water for the movie,
filmed with the realism that marked the emerging Italian
cinema after the Second World War. "It was frightfully
humid," Dowling recalled. "We really lived the life of the
people who worked in the fields." Other films Dowling made
in Italy included Orson Welles's Othello (released in 1955
but three years in the making), in which she played Bianca.
Returning to the US, Dowling continued to work in movies,
mainly undistinguished except for a good western, Running
Target (1956), plus extensive theatre work. She was in 100
television shows, including Perry Mason, Bonanza, Kojak,
Barnaby Jones and the 1980 mini-series Scruples. She was
last seen in an episode of Murder, She Wrote (1984).
She became the seventh wife of Artie Shaw in 1952, married a
United Artists executive in 1956, and is survived by her
third husband, a publicist, and her son by Shaw.
Tom Vallance