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Arlene Dahl

With her lush red hair and signature beauty mark, Arlene Dahl joined the court of MGM royalty in late 1940s and early 1950s, soon becoming more an icon of womanly elegance than of thespian prowess. A Minnesota native, Dahl followed the standard pattern of fresh-scrubbed, Midwestern girl-makes-it-big, whose ravishing looks and curvaceous figure vaulted her from beer advertising to the silver screen almost overnight. Paired early in films with Red Skelton and Van Johnson, she largely played the role of eye-candy, often in color-filmed adventures and fluffy comedies. She distinguished herself more in smaller films with more textured roles, including as a vampy French conspirator in "Reign of Terror" (1949) and a felonious temptress in "Slightly Scarlet" (1956). The limelight fell on her personal life as well, via celebrity couplings with "Tarzan" Lex Barker and "Latin Lover" Fernando Lamas, both tempestuous unions and the first of her many marriages. A colorful sci-fi splash in "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (1959) signified the apex of her film career, but she had already established a plan B as a beauty and fashion maven via a syndicated newspaper column, which she would expand into a book series and a lucrative career in advertising and the beauty products industry. After going bankrupt in the early 1970s, Dahl returned to show business for a smattering of television projects, highlighted by a three-year stint on the soap opera, "One Life to Live" (ABC, 1968-2013), and would reinvent herself again as a celebrity astrologer. She wound down her screen career with intermittent appearances in projects starring her son, Lorenzo Lamas. A star of stage, screen and business, Dahl turned her relatively short stint as the toast of Hollywood into a launch pad to become a kind of pre-feminist Renaissance woman.