Bonanza and Highway to Heaven star Michael Landon may be in the limelight but did you know about his first wife – Dodie Levy Fraser? But, you must be thinking that was Dodie’s final marriage, guess again! Here is what we can now about Michael Landon’s first and late wife.
Dodie Levy Fraser, like any other woman of the Victorian and Modern era, had quite an exciting experience in as much as she had been married thrice. She was married to Michael Landon for six years, in which he began cheating on her with a model before they divorced.
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Early Life
Dodie was born in March of 1933, and that is three years earlier than Michael Landon was born. She was born in New York City to Nissim, a father, and Victoria Samarel, a mother. She reported having a brother and a sister and made the comment that they were the ones who raised her.
This means that probably her parents were dead, or could have left her early but we cannot explicitly be sure of that because her personal life is not revealed in detail. Fraser graduated into acting in primary school, and she was accorded to theatrical shows to nourish her passion.
At high school completion, she began her professional acting career, and as a few years later, she took up writing, though it was her secondary occupation. When Fraser died, she was working as a legal secretary, that is, her career life took such a turn.
Personal Life
Dodie could not reveal much about her first marriage as she seemed to be maybe very young to have been in it. She was married and widowed shortly after giving birth to a son, Mark. The girl was about 12 years old at the time she married Michael Landon, and the American actor gladly adopted him.
Michael Landon and Dodie Fraser first got together in 1956 and got married in the same year. When the two got together, Fraser was already a mother to a boy from her previous marriage; she later adopted another with Landon. The second son’s name was Josh and the couple adopted him, and he was still a toddler when he was adopted.
As we can see, the marriage was evidently deteriorating years before the divorce in 1961 because Landon was cheating on his wife with a model. It was rather expected by Fraser that accepting a third son to the family would unite them and heal the torn marriage. He later married her in 1963 however, they also divorced in 1982.
While Michael Landon proceeded to marry a new wife, a year after divorcing Dodie Levy Fraser, the latter did not do the same. Indeed, after her divorce, it took her three years to remarry again then another 6 years to remarry again. In the year 1971, she tied the knot with Dr; Peter Lake and according to some records they had been together until her death.
