Dodie Levy-Fraser is a name most people meet sideways, through someone else. She was the first wife of Michael Landon, the actor who went on to become Little Joe Cartwright in Bonanza and Charles Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie. Yet her own story began long before Landon became famous, and it carried on quietly for more than thirty years after their marriage ended.
She was born Dorothy Levy in New York City in 1933, and she was already a mother when she met the young man who would become Michael Landon. Dodie Levy-Fraser married him in 1956, when he was still trying to make his way as an actor. She was there for the lean years, the early auditions, and the first taste of success – and for the marriage that broke down, the divorce in 1962, and the long, private life that followed in California.
This article looks at what can be verified about her life, and it is honest about what cannot – where the sources conflict, it says so.
Quick Facts: Dodie Levy-Fraser
- Full name: Dorothy “Dodie” Levy-Fraser
- Born: 16 March 1933, New York City, USA
- Parents: Nissim Levy and Victoria “Dora” Samarel Levy
- Siblings: Solomon Isaac Levy and Mary Levy Ruggraffe
- Best known for: First wife of actor Michael Landon
- Married Michael Landon: 11 March 1956
- Divorced Michael Landon: December 1962
- Children in the family: Mark Fraser Landon, Josh Fraser Landon, and Jason – see the family section
- Later husband: Dr. Peter Lake – the date of this marriage is disputed
- Profession: Legal secretary / legal administrative assistant
- Died: 5 July 1994, aged 61, Riverside County, California, USA
- Net worth: Not publicly documented
Early Life in New York City
Dodie Levy-Fraser was born on 16 March 1933 in New York City, to Nissim Levy and Victoria “Dora” Samarel Levy. The date and place appear again and again across the biographies that cover her life, and they are the most consistent facts in her story.
Dodie Levy-Fraser grew up with two older siblings, a brother, Solomon Isaac Levy, and a sister, Mary Levy Ruggraffe. The spelling of Mary’s married name varies between sources – Ruggraffe in some, Rugraffe in others – a small reminder of how little of this family history was ever written down in one reliable place.
Very little is known about her school years, and it would be wrong to invent a childhood for her. Some accounts say she took part in school theatre as a girl, but that detail appears without a named school, a named play, or a contemporary source to back it up. What is clearer is her early adult life. She married young, for the first time, before she met Michael Landon. The name of her first husband is not publicly known. What is known is that it gave her a son, Mark, born on 1 October 1948. When she met Landon, she was a mother in her early twenties, already carrying real responsibilities.
Meeting Michael Landon and the 1956 Wedding
The young man Dodie Levy-Fraser married in 1956 was not yet Michael Landon. He was born Eugene Maurice Orowitz on 31 October 1936 in Forest Hills, Queens, New York. He was three years younger than Dodie, he was trying to become an actor, and he had not yet had the break that would change his life. One later account says they met in 1955, when she was working as a secretary for his agent.
Dodie Levy-Fraser married Michael Landon on 11 March 1956, in a simple ceremony with family and close friends. She was 23. He was 20. There was no red carpet and no sense, at that point, that this marriage would one day be written about at all. The timing matters. Landon did not land his defining role until 1959, when he was cast as Little Joe Cartwright in Bonanza. That means Dodie was with him for the three years before fame arrived – the auditions, the rejections, the small parts, and the uncertainty of trying to make a living from acting.
A Family Formed in the Late 1950s
When Dodie Levy-Fraser married Landon, her son Mark, then eight years old, was adopted by him and became Mark Fraser Landon. The adoption is one of the best-documented parts of her story. Mark went on to try acting himself, with small roles including the 1991 television film Us, which his father wrote and directed, and Goodbye America in 1997. He died on 11 May 2009, aged 60, at his home in West Hollywood, and he was buried at Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, in the same place as his father. No foul play was suspected.
Dodie Levy-Fraser and Landon then adopted a second son as an infant. Josh Fraser Landon was born in 1960, but even his exact birth date is not settled. Some sources give 1 February 1960, others give 11 February 1960. This article gives the year and flags the day as unverified. Josh grew up away from the spotlight, and very little reliable public information exists about his adult life. That silence is worth respecting, and it is not a gap to be filled with guesswork.
Then there is Jason. Several accounts say that Dodie and Landon adopted a third child, a newborn, in 1961 or 1962, shortly before their marriage ended. After the divorce, Dodie was given full custody of all three children. Later accounts, published in 2026, say that Jason was subsequently given to another adoptive family, the Smith family. That is a painful detail, and it rests on a small number of recent retellings rather than on a court record this article could check.
Work as a Legal Secretary
If you ask what Dodie Levy-Fraser did for a living, the most consistent answer is also the least glamorous one: she worked as a legal secretary, or legal administrative assistant. That is the job named in the biographies that stick closest to the verifiable facts, and it is the job she was still described as doing at the time of her death.
Some other biographies give her a very different career, calling her an actress, a producer, a director, and an author. Those claims come without a film, a play, a book, or a credit that can be checked. There is no filmography attached to her name, and no title is named for anything she is said to have written or directed. That does not prove she never tried those things, but on the evidence available the acting and producing career cannot be treated as verified, and this article does not present it as fact. The legal-secretary work fits Dodie Levy-Fraser, a woman who valued stability, had children to raise, and needed a reliable income after her marriage ended.
The Marriage Breaks Down and the Divorce
By the early 1960s, the marriage was in trouble. Bonanza had made Landon famous, and fame changed the balance of the household. The work took him away, the money and the attention grew, and the private life that had held the family together began to fray. Landon began a relationship with Marjorie Lynn Noe, who had worked as an extra on Bonanza. He filed for divorce in March 1962, and the divorce was finalised on 1 December 1962, ending a marriage that had lasted just over six years.
Within a year, in January 1963, Landon married Lynn Noe. That second marriage lasted until 1982. He later married Cindy Clerico in 1983, and remained with her until his death from pancreatic cancer on 1 July 1991, aged 54. Dodie Levy-Fraser, meanwhile, was left to rebuild. She had custody of the children, a job to hold down, and a life to make in California. She did not give interviews about the divorce, and she did not build a public career out of being an ex-wife.
Later Life and a Disputed Second Marriage
What happened after the divorce is where the sources most clearly disagree, and the disagreement is too important to smooth over. It concerns her later marriage to Dr. Peter Lake, and the two versions cannot both be right in full.
The older version says that Dodie married Dr. Peter Lake in 1971, nine years after her divorce from Landon, and that they remained married until her death in 1994. In this version, the marriage was quiet, private, and stable – a second chance at a settled life, away from Hollywood.
A newer version, published in 2026, says something very different. In this version, she married Dr. Peter Anthony Lake in 1976, not 1971. Lake was a young neurosurgeon, the first director of medical education and research at Eisenhower Medical Center in California. The wedding was small, held in a patient suite at the medical centre. A few months later, in August 1976, Lake died, aged only 36, after an illness. In this version, Dodie was widowed after a marriage that lasted months, not decades.
This article does not choose between those two accounts, because the research for it could not settle the question from a primary record. The 1971 version is more common in the older biographies. The 1976 version is more specific, naming a hospital, a job title, an age, and a month of death. What can be said with confidence is that she did marry a Dr. Peter Lake after her divorce, that the marriage was kept private, and that its date and length are disputed.
The same honesty applies to the end of her life. Dodie Levy-Fraser died on 5 July 1994, aged 61, in Riverside County, California. Palm Springs is named as the place in several accounts. No cause of death has been publicly documented in a reliable source. Some accounts say she died of natural causes, but those phrases are repeated without a named medical source.
What Is Not Known
Dodie Levy-Fraser’s net worth is a good example of the limits here. Some online biographies give a figure of $500,000 at the time of her death. Others say, more honestly, that her net worth was never publicly documented. No estate record or financial filing was found during research to support a figure, so no figure is given here as fact.
The same applies to her first husband, whose name is not publicly known, and to her sister Mary, who is reported to have died in 1989 – a date that comes from a small number of sources and should be read with care. There is also no verified burial place for Dodie herself that this research could confirm from a primary source. Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City is named in some accounts, and it is certainly where Michael Landon and Mark Landon are buried. Whether that is also where Dodie was laid to rest is not established here.
Why Dodie Levy-Fraser Still Matters
It is tempting to treat Dodie Levy-Fraser as a footnote, and many accounts do exactly that. She appears in the first paragraph of Michael Landon’s biography, and then she disappears. That is a pity, because her life says something useful about the early years of television fame, and about the people who stood beside it before it arrived.
Dodie Levy-Fraser was there before Bonanza, before the money, and before the name Michael Landon meant anything to a television audience. She helped raise the boy who became Mark Fraser Landon, and she helped build the household in which Landon became a father for the first time. Those are not small things. They are the foundation on which a very public life was built, in private, without applause.
You can read more about the wider world she lived in through general reference material – for background on the era, the shows, and the people around her, see Wikipedia and you can find more stories like this one on the Cornovaglia homepage.
Frequently Asked Questions About Dodie Levy-Fraser
Who was Dodie Levy-Fraser?
Dodie Levy-Fraser was the first wife of actor Michael Landon. She was born Dorothy Levy in New York City on 16 March 1933, worked as a legal secretary, and was married to Landon from 1956 to 1962, before he became famous for Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie.
How long was Dodie Levy-Fraser married to Michael Landon?
She was married to Michael Landon for just over six years, from 11 March 1956 until their divorce was finalised on 1 December 1962. Landon married his second wife, Marjorie Lynn Noe, in January 1963.
Did Dodie Levy-Fraser have children?
Yes. Her son Mark Fraser Landon, born on 1 October 1948 from her first marriage, was adopted by Landon in 1956. She and Landon also adopted Josh Fraser Landon as an infant in 1960. A third child, Jason, is reported as adopted in 1961 or 1962, but the details of his later life could not be verified.
What did Dodie Levy-Fraser do for a living?
The most consistently reported job for Dodie Levy-Fraser was legal secretary, also described as a legal administrative assistant. Some biographies also call her an actress, producer, director, and author, but those claims come without a named film, play, or book, so they are treated here as unverified.
When did Dodie Levy-Fraser die?
Dodie Levy-Fraser died on 5 July 1994, aged 61, in Riverside County, California. The cause of her death has not been publicly documented in a reliable source, and her net worth was also never publicly documented, despite a $500,000 estimate in some online biographies.
Conclusion
Dodie Levy-Fraser lived a life that was, by turns, ordinary and extraordinary. She was born in New York in 1933, became a mother young, married a struggling young actor in 1956, and was there when that actor became Michael Landon. Dodie Levy-Fraser raised her sons, worked as a legal secretary, went through a painful divorce, and then chose a private life in California for more than thirty years. Some parts of that life are clear; others, like the date of her later marriage, are disputed. She deserves to be remembered as more than a first wife – as a mother, a worker, and a woman who kept her own counsel.
