Michele Lee (born Michelle Lee Dusick on June 24, 1942 in Los Angeles) is an American actress, most known for her role as Karen Fairgate MacKenzie on the 1980s soap opera Knots Landing.
She first became known for her saccharine sweet roles in the films How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967), The Love Bug (1968), and The Comic (1969). The 1970s were especially trying on Michele, as 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. In 1976, her mother died, and she stopped acting for years.
In 1979, she accepted an acting job after a three-year sabbatical, a role for a series called Knots Landing, a spinoff of Dallas. The first episodes of the series were not high-rated and cancellation was rumored, but the network continued to support it and eventually the show took off. As one of the leads, Lee became very popular with fans, winning the Soap Opera Digest Award for Lead Actress five times.
As the show moved into the 1990s, Knots Landing's popularity waned. The big budget that the series once had was trimmed, and in the final season, the higher paid cast members were asked to appear in only 15 of the season's 19 episodes, as the budget constraints had become so much that the production company couldn't pay them anymore. Lee refused and appeared in all 19 episodes that season (doing her extra four for union scale).
Since the cancellation of Knots Landing in 1993, Lee has appeared in many made-for-TV movies including a biopic of country star Dottie West, as well as the Knots Landing reunion special, Knots Landing: Back to the Cul-de-Sac. In 2004, she returned to feature films in the role of Ben Stiller's mother in Along Came Polly.
