Dodie Levy Fraser: The Life and Legacy of Michael Landon’s First Wife

Dodie Levy Fraser was born in March of 1933, three years before Michael Landon was born. Her birthplace was New York City, and she was born to Nissim, her father, and Victoria Samarel, her mother. She had a brother and a sister, and she mentioned once that they were the ones to raise her.

This implies that her parents were maybe dead or out of the picture, but we don’t know enough about her secretive personal life to say for sure. She got into acting in primary school and participated in theatrical shows to feed talent.

When she graduated from high school, she started a professional career in acting and began working as an author alongside her main career a couple of years later. She was a legal secretary when Dodie died, so her career life took an interesting turn.

The First Marriage

Dodie Levy Fraser didn’t share a lot about her first marriage because she was apparently so young at the time. Her husband died shortly after the marriage, and she shared a child with him called Mark. Mark was 12 years old when she married Michael Landon, and the American actor gladly took him under his wing.

Source: https://www.dicytrends.com

Fraser’s Marriage to Michael Landon

Michael Landon and Dodie Fraser met in 1956, and they tied the knot in the same year. At the time, she had a boy from her first marriage, and she went on to adopt another with Landon. The second son was called Josh, and the couple adopted him while he was still an infant.

In 1961, the marriage was already falling apart because Landon had apparently been seeing a model behind his wife’s back. Strangely enough, Dodie thought adopting a third son would unite them and fix their torn marriage. She went through the adoption process, adopting a boy named Jason in May 1961.

However, the marriage went beyond saving, and the couple got a divorce a year later. According to the news back then, Landon publicly dated Marjorie Lynn Noe, a model, before his divorce from Dodie was final. He went on to marry in 1963, but they divorced in 1982 as well.

Dodie Levy Fraser’s Last Marriage

Although Michael Landon went in to get married only a year after his divorce from Dodie, she didn’t do the same. In fact, she waited 9 years to tie the knot again. In 1971, she married Dr. Peter Lake, and it’s believed they stayed married until death.

She was pretty secretive about her third marriage, which is understandable considering her marriage with Michael Landon stayed under the spotlight for a long time. That’s why we don’t know much about the third marriage, which was apparently successful.

Dodie Levy Fraser’s Death

Her life ended on the 5th of July, 1994. She was 61 years old back then, and she died in Riverside County, California. There’s been no declared reason for death, so we believe it might have been a natural cause. Meanwhile, Michael Landon died three years before Dodie, suffering from pancreatic cancer. He was then married to his third wife, Cindy Landon.