Dolores Vitina Marcus was born to Frank Marcus and his wife Rose in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to a family of Sicilian and Hungarian heritage. As a teenager, she developed a passion for ballet and learned to play the violin, also working briefly as a model for the Huntington Hartford Agency.
Vitina's formal acting training began at the age of 17, when she enrolled in Lee Strasberg's Actor's Studio. She soon adopted the stage name Dolores Vitina, inspired by her Sicilian grandmother.
Vitina's screen debut came in 1952, as one of the 16 female dancers in The June Taylor Dancers, featured on The Jackie Gleason Show. Her motion picture debut followed in the crime drama Never Love a Stranger (1958).
Between 1959 and 1970, Vitina appeared in numerous classic TV shows, often playing exotic and sultry characters, including Native American roles in Have Gun - Will Travel, Death Valley Days, Rawhide, Gunsmoke, and The Virginian. She also played a 'female Tarzan' in an episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Kublai Khan's daughter in The Time Tunnel.
Vitina's collaboration with producer Irwin Allen began around 1959 or 1960, and she became a regular feature in his fantasy and science fiction productions. Her characters often found themselves menaced by dinosaurs, phantoms, and giant spiders, and she was famously known for her role as Athena, aka 'The Green Lady', in the Lost in Space episode 'The Girl from the Green Dimension'.
After retiring from acting in 1970, Vitina moved to Las Vegas, where she worked as a cocktail waitress before becoming a real estate broker under her married name Vitina Graham.
