Billie Dove

Lovely Billie Dove in a dreamy closeup view by photographer Harold Dean Carsey (from 1928). Dove was born Lillian Bohny on May 14, 1903 (several sources list 1900), to Swiss parents who emigrated to New York City before she was born. As a teen, she worked as a model to help support her family and was hired as a teenager by Florenz Ziegfeld to appear in his Ziegfeld Follies Revue. She legally changed her name to Lillian Bohny in the early 1920s and moved to Hollywood, where she began appearing in silent films. She made her feature debut in George M. Cohan's “Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford” (1921), based on the 1910 Broadway play. The cameras instantly fell in love with the beautiful newcomer. She soon became one of the more popular actresses of the 1920s, appearing in Douglas Fairbanks' smash hit two-strip Technicolor film "The Black Pirate" (1926), "The American Beauty" (1927) and as Rodeo West in "The Painted Angel" (1929). Following her last film "Blondie of the Follies" (1932), Dove retired from the screen to be with her family. She married wealthy oil executive Robert Alan Kenaston in 1933, a marriage that lasted for 37 years until his death in 1970. Other than an unbilled bit part of a nurse in the movie "Diamond Head" (1962) with Charlton Heston, Dove never returned to the screen. 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 passed away of pneumonia on New Year's Eve 1997, aged 94.

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