Doris Dowling

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Actress

Doris Dowling, the brunette actress who made her screen debut as the hooker in “The Lost Weekend,” died June 18 in Los Angeles. She was 81.

She had been in deteriorating health since a heart attack five years ago.

The Detroit-born actress started her career on the stage before coming to Hollywood with her sister, late actress Constance Dowling. Doris Dowling made a splash in Billy Wilder’s 1945 “The Lost Weekend,” which won Academy Awards for picture, actor, director and screenplay.

In her next movie, the Raymond Chandler-scripted “The Blue Dahlia,” she played the murder victim in the mystery that starred Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.

When her Hollywood career began to wane, she and her sister moved to Rome and spent several years working in Italian films.

Director Giuseppe de Santis cast her as a Italian jewelry thief in “Bitter Rice,” an acclaimed neorealist film.

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Dowling made five other picsin Italy and France, including one in English, Orson Welles’ “Othello.”

In her later years, she did guest appearances on television shows such as “Bonanza,” “Barnaby Jones” and “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

She served on the board of directors of Los Angeles’ Theater East.

Dowling married three times. She was the seventh wife of bandleader Artie Shaw, whom she married in 1952 and divorced in ’56. She was married to United Artists exec Robert F. Blumofe from 1956 until their divorce in 1959.

In 1960, she married producer Leonard B. Kaufman, who survives her.

Dowling is also survived by a son.

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