By the late 1960s, her career had started to decline, and a highly publicized marriage to Bobby Darin ended in divorce. The year of her divorce, Dee's contract with Universal Pictures was dropped. She attempted a comeback with the 1970 independent horror film The Dunwich Horror, but rarely acted after this time, appearing only occasionally in television productions throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. The rest of the decade was marred by alcoholism, mental illness, plus near total reclusiveness, particularly after her mother died in 1988. Afterwards she sought medical and psychological help in the early 1990s, and died in 2005 of complications from kidney disease, brought on by lifelong anorexia nervosa.
Dee was born Alexandra Zuck on April 23, 1942 in Bayonne, New Jersey, the only child of John Zuck and Mary (née Cimboliak) Zuck, who met as teenagers at a Russian Orthodox Church dance. They married shortly afterward, but divorced before Dee was five years old. She was of Carpatho-Rusyn ancestry and raised in the Orthodox faith; her son, Dodd Darin, wrote in his biographical book about his parents titled Dream Lovers that Dee's mother Mary and her aunt Olga [later Olga Duda] "were first generation daughters of a working-class Russian Orthodox couple", and Dee recalled, "we belonged to a Russian Orthodox church, and there was dancing at the social events."
She soon adopted the name Sandra Dee, becoming a professional model by the age of four and progressing to television commercials.[citation needed]
There has been some dispute as to Dee's actual birth year, with evidence pointing to both 1942 and 1944. Legal records, including her California divorce record from Bobby Darin, as well as the Social Security Death Index and her own cryptstone all give her year of birth as 1942. In a 1967 interview with the Oxnard Press-Courier, she acknowledged being 18 in 1960 when she first met Darin, whom she wed three months later.

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