Billie Dove (May 14, 1903 – December 31, 1997) was an American actress.
Billie Dove was born Lillian Bohny on May 14, 1903 in New York City to parents Charles and Bertha Bohny, both 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 Ziegfeld Follies Revue. She migrated to Hollywood in the early 1920s and began appearing in films. She soon became one of ...
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Billie Dove (May 14, 1903 – December 31, 1997) was an American actress.
Billie Dove was born Lillian Bohny on May 14, 1903 in New York City to parents Charles and Bertha Bohny, both 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 Ziegfeld 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 appearing in Douglas Fairbanks' smash hit two-tone technicolor film The Black Pirate (1926) and was dubbed The American Beauty (1927), the title of one of her films.
She married the director of her seventh 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...
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