Born in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in East Tennessee, Dolly Parton grew up to become the queen of country music and transformed her humble origins into the stuff of myth at Dollywood, her wildly popular Smoky Mountains theme park. Performing on Knoxville radio as a singing guitarist by the time she was 11, she made her TV debut on the syndicated "The Porter Wagoner Show" in 1960 and moved to Nashville following her graduation from high school in 1964. She cultivated a "trashy" look early in her career, favoring bright red nails ("I needed to be colorful to look at"), bleach-blonde hair (replaced later by platinum wigs) and five-inch heals ("Because I can't find six-inch heels"), but her abiding trademark is her chest, two Tennessee mountains that have inspired a multitude of jokes, many told on herself by Parton (i.e., "I would have been very tall had I not got so bunched up at the top"). Parton joined Wagoner's Wagon Masters band in 1967, performing with him for the next seven years at the Grand Ole Opry, on tour and in recording sessions, not to mention serving as his voluptuous foil on his TV show, developing the presence that would make her a star in her own right. Her solo act repertoire became less overtly country, and there was no looking back after her 1977 Grammy-winning single "Here You Come Again" crossed over into the US Hot 100 pop charts. A media celebrity on TV specials and talk shows by the end of the decade, she ventured into movies in 1980, giving an engaging performance as a Southern secretary opposite Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in "9 to 5", the film succeeding to a large degree on the strength of her presence and charm. She also wrote the film's title song, which earned an Oscar nomination and a Grammy.
Parton was a delight as the good-hearted brothel owner Miss Mona opposite Burt Reynolds in "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" (1982), but the film based on the Broadway hit was ultimately unsatisfying. "Rhinestone" (1984, featuring her first movie score), with Sylvester Stallone, missed the mark completely, and she experienced some very un-Dollylike depression in the early 80s, a brief departure from her energetic, cheerful persona. Rebounding from that, her career's recovery lagged behind despite her successful collaboration with Kenny Rogers, which yielded their hit cover of the Bee Gees' "Islands in the Stream" and several popular TV specials beginning with "Kenny and Dolly: A Christmas to Remember" (CBS, 1984). With her pop-flavored albums continuing to falter and her big-budgeted ABC variety series "Dolly" (1987-88) flopping altogether, it remained for the movies to come to the rescue and in her own words "make me hot again." She roared back on the strength of her Truvy, the owner of a hair salon in the 1989 adaptation of Robert Harling's play "Steel Magnolias".
After that, Parton branched out as executive producer of "Dolly Parton: Christmas at Home" (ABC, 1990) and took things a step farther as executive producer and writer of both the story and music for the NBC movie "Wild Texas Wind" (1991). Although "Straight Talk" (1992, her last feature to date as an actor) bombed, Parton's song "I Will Always Love You" became a huge hit that year for Whitney Houston as the theme of "The Bodyguard". Parton also voiced the character of Murph for the PBS animated children series "The Magic School Bus" (1994-1998) and starred (and executive produced) the TV-movie "Unlikely Angel" (CBS, 1996). An astute businesswoman, she is the joint owner, with manager Sandy Gallin, of Sandollar, a production company, and her theme park, Dollywood, located in the Smoky Mountains of her birth, outdraws Graceland (it brought in nearly $600 million in 1997). Music remains her first love, and recent years have seen her return to her country roots, less concerned in the crossover potential of her songs.
