Actors - Michele Lee

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	Actors - Michele Lee

Michele Lee (born on June 24, 1942) is an American singer, dancer, actress, producer, director and frequent game show panelist of the 1970s most known for her role as the beloved matriarch Karen Cooper Fairgate MacKenzie on the 1980s prime-time soap opera, Knots Landing.

Early life

Michelle Lee Dusick was born to a Jewish makeup artist father and stay-at-home mother in Los Angeles, California. She began singing in 1945 in front of her parents, and was soon consumed into the entire community. When she was in 10th grade, she tried out for a band and served as its lead singer. At her parents' wishes, she dropped the name Dusick, and the extra l in Michelle, leaving her name Michele Lee.

Stage Performer

She began her career on television in an episode of the late 1950s sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. She soon began appearing in musicals, becoming a star on Broadway at the age of 19 in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in the role of "Rosemary", opposite Robert Morse and the late Rudy Vallee, a role she reprised in the film version. After graduating from high school in 1960, she auditioned for the Broadway play Vintage '60. She also appeared in more plays, such as the Los Angeles production of Parade and in the New York-Italian production of ‘’Bravo Giovanni’’ that same year.

Singer

In addition to starring on Broadway plays, she also made guest appearances on a number of variety and game shows, making her debut on an episode of The Danny Kaye Show in 1963. This part led to other guest appearances on The Match Game, What’s My Line, The Carol Burnett Show, Hollywood Squares, and others. As her popularity grew in the late 1960s, she was also a recording artist signed to Columbia Records. Between 1967 & 1968, she recorded 2 separate albums per year. The first album she recorded was A Taste of the Fantastic which was followed by L. David Sloane. She sung mostly in nightclubs and traveled to the famous Persian Room in New York and the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas.

Film and TV work

After she sang and starred in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967), she first became known for her saccharine roles in the films The Love Bug
(1968), and The Comic (1969). Soon after, she and husband James Farentino had a son, David Farentino (born 6 July, 1969). Lee’s movie The Love Bug became the biggest blockbuster movie of the year that same year. She continued her frequent game show panelist appearances on a number of game shows, including The $25,000 Pyramid and Hollywood Squares. The 1970s were especially trying on Michele after her father died in 1970. She worked infrequently until accepting a role on Broadway in Seesaw, which netted her a Tony Award nomination in 1974. Her mother died in 1976, and Lee stopped acting for years.

Television work

Knots Landing

In 1979 Lee accepted an acting job after a three-year sabbatical, the leading role in Knots Landing, a spinoff of Dallas. On Knots Lee was cast as feisty matriarch Karen Fairgate MacKenzie. Her co-stars on the show were Joan Van Ark and Ted Shackelford, who played Karen's best friends and neighbors, Val and Gary Ewing. Lee had been a stranger to Van Ark up until 1979, but the two would go on to become friends off-screen. The first episodes of the series were not high-rated, but the network continued to support it and eventually the show took off. Although Lee was finally having great success, her marriage was failing. Coincidentally, she and her husband James Farentino divorced at around the same time Lee's onscreen husband, Don Murray left the show. Lee thus played a single mother on Knots at the same time she was becoming one in real life. In 2005, Lee revealed that when her character took off her wedding ring in 1983, after a year of mourning, Lee was taking off her real life wedding band.

When Lee and Farentino divorced in 1983, she met Fred Rappaport at a party, whom she married in 1987. During the fall of 1982, her character met M. Patrick "Mack" Mackenzie (Kevin Dobson) who became her husband a year later. As one of the leads, Lee became very popular with fans, winning the Soap Opera Digest Award for Lead Actress five times, and being nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series once in 1982. In 1983, the writers/producers of Knots Landing urged her to do a storyline based on drug dependency. She hated the script, but agreed to do the storyline. Six years later, Lee directed her first episode and continued to do so until the series ended. Co-star Joan Van Ark has publicly praised Lee's directing skills. In 1990, Knots Landing was reached a milestone with almost at 300 episodes in the can, being second-only to its parent soap, Dallas. During the 12th season, Michele Lee wrote her favorite scene from the series which is known as the "Pollyanna Speech" among fans. In this scene, the character explains how she would like to be a pollyanna, but cannot be due to the world around her.

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