Billie Dove

She was born Lillian Bohney 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 fifteen by Florenz Ziegfeld to appear in his Ziegfeld Follies Revue. She migrated to Hollywood in 1922 and began appearing in films. Her great beauty and easily recognizable name helped her become one of the most popular actresses of the 1920s. She was soon dubbed The American Beauty which was also the title of one of her films.

She married the director of her second film, Irvin Willat, in 1923 but the two seperated and eventually divorced in 1929. Dove had a huge legion of male fans and one of her most persistant was Howard Hughes. She shared a three year romance with Hughes and was engaged to marry him but their relationship ended and she never gave a reason for the break-up. Hughes cast her as a comedianne in his film Cock of the Air (1932).

Following her last film, Blondie of the Follies (1932), Dove decided to retire from the screen to raise a family. She married oil executive Robert Kenaston in 1933, a marriage that lasted for thirty seven years. They had two children – one son and one adopted daughter. She later had a brief third marriage to architect John Miller.

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.

She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame located at 6351 Hollywood Blvd.