Constance Dowling

Discovered by producer Samuel Goldwyn in Elia Kazan's flop play The Strings, My Lord, Are False (1942), hazel-eyed Constance Dowling was ushered into the screen version of Knickerbocker Holiday (1944) and Danny Kaye's Up in Arms (1944). But there was something icy and disturbing about her that didn't exactly spell musical comedy, and Dowling made more of an impact playing scheming women (i.e. the blackmailing torch singer Mavis Marlowe in the 1946 film noir Black Angel, in which she is summarily bumped off). Like her sister Doris Dowling, Constance came to tire of Hollywood typecasting, however, and found a more liberating venue for her talents in Italian films. She returned to Hollywood in the 1950s, however, and married Hungarian writer/producer Ivan Tors, the producer of her 1954 science fiction melodrama Gog. Constance Dowling's early death in 1969 was attributed to cardiac arrest.

~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide