Billie Dove
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Billie Dove (born May 14, 1903 - died December 31, 1997) was an American actress.
[edit] Early Life and Career
She was born Bertha Bohny in New York City to Swiss immigrants. As a teen, she worked as a model to help support her family and was hired at the age of 15 by Florenz Ziegfeld to appear in his Ziegfield Follies Revue. She migrated to Hollywood in the early 1920s and began appearing in films. She soon became one of the most popular actresses of the 1920s. She legally changed her name to Lillian Bohny in 1923. She was one of the most popular actresses of her time, and reportedly the most beautiful. She was dubbed The American Beauty which was also the title of one of her films.
She married the director of her seventh[1] film, Irvin Willat, in 1923. The two divorced in 1929. Dove had a huge legion of male fans, one of her most persistent being Howard Hughes. She shared a three-year romance with Hughes and was engaged to marry him, but she ended the relationship without ever giving cause. Hughes cast her as a comedian in his film Cock of the Air (1932). She also appeared in his movie The Age for Love (1931).
[edit] Early Retirement
Following her last film, Blondie of the Follies (1932), Dove retired from the screen to be with her family, although at the time still popular. She next married oil executive Robert Kenaston in 1933, a marriage that lasted for 37 years until their divorce. They had two children - one son and one adopted daughter. She later had a brief third marriage to architect John Miller, which also ended in divorce.
Aside from a brief cameo in Diamond Head (1962), Dove never returned to the movies. She spent her retirement years in Rancho Mirage before moving into the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California where she died of pneumonia in 1997, aged 94.
She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame located at 6351 Hollywood Blvd.
