She had already started branching out when her film career was at its height, writing a syndicated column and launching a fashion and cosmetics business.
Arlene Dahl, who parlayed success as a movie actress in the 1940s and ’50s into an even more successful career as an author, beauty expert, astrologist, and fashion and cosmetics entrepreneur, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 96. The death was confirmed by her husband, Marc Rosen. Strikingly beautiful, Ms. Dahl was a model before becoming an actress — “considered one of the world’s loveliest gals,” The Daily News of New York wrote in a profile in 1959, using the parlance of the day. With her fiery red hair, she was a natural for Technicolor; she notably played the seductive sister of another famous redhead, Rhonda Fleming, in the 1956 crime drama “Slightly Scarlet.” But though she demonstrated her range in everything from westerns, like “The Outriders” (1950), to the Red Skelton comedies “A Southern Yankee” (1948) and “Watch the Birdie” (1950), critics tended to focus on her looks more than her acting. “Arlene Dahl is displayed to wondrous advantage,” declared one review of the 1953 adventure “Diamond Queen.” The industry did the same. “Arlene Dahl was another classic case — like Jane Greer and Evelyn Keyes — of a smart, fiercely funny woman being pigeonholed by her beauty,” Eddie Muller, who organizes an annual film noir festival in San Francisco, said in an interview in 2009, when Ms. Dahl was the event’s guest of honor. “It was hard for her to break out of the ‘redheaded bombshell’ mold. “The great thing about Arlene,” he continued, “is that she didn’t let it bother her. She moved easily into other businesses and always seemed to be enjoying herself.” Ms. Dahl had already started branching out when her film career was at its height. In 1951, she began writing a beauty column, titled “Let’s Be Beautiful,” for the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate, which she would continue for 20 years.
