Dorothy Lamour, the sarong-wearing, straight-faced foil to Bob Hope and Bing Crosby as they traveled the world in their "Road" pictures, is dead at 81.
Miss Lamour died Sunday at her North Hollywood home. The cause of death was not disclosed, said longtime friend Frank Liberman.In a statement, Hope called Miss Lamour his "No. 1 leading lady," and said he would remember her not just as a colleague, but as a close friend. "She was one of the grandest ladies on screen, in life," he said. "She was a lady of quality, beauty and class, which always made me look good."
At Hope's 90th birthday four years ago, Miss Lamour told the audience what it was like to work with the two legends.
"I felt like a wonderful sandwich, a slice of white bread between two slices of ham," she quipped.
Miss Lamour, wearing the wraparound garment that helped win her fame, was typecast as a female Tarzan in a string of island-theme movies in the late 1930s and early '40s.
She donned the costume in her first film, the 1936 movie "Jungle Princess," a story about a pilot who crashes his plane in a jungle and finds a native girl in a sarong.
Paramount signed her for $200 a week, and she went on to play similar parts in "Typhoon," "Beyond the Blue Horizon" and the 1937 John Ford film "The Hurricane."
She also wore her sarong in the first of the Hope-Crosby "Road" pictures, "The Road to Singapore," in 1940.
The trio went on to make six more films over the next 22 years: "The Road to Zanzibar," "The Road to Morocco," "The Road to Utopia," "The Road to Rio," "The Road to Bali" and "The Road to Hong Kong."
Of the seven films, she liked to joke: "We only count six, because `Hong Kong' created a bomb."
The films combined adventure, slapstick, zany ad libs and inside-show-biz satire. Miss Lamour played the exotic brunette who fell in league with the playboy with the ski-jump nose and his smooth-voiced pal who vied for her attentions.
"I was the happiest and highest-paid straight woman in the business," she recalled years later.
In 1987, she played a sloppilydressed housewife who is murdered in "Creepshow 2." "Well, at my age you can't lean against a palm tree and sing `Moon of Monakoora,"' she said. "People would look at that and say, `What is she trying to do?' "