Lillian Bohny (born Bertha Eugenie Bohny; May 14, 1903 both immigrants from Switzerland. She had a younger brother, Charles Reinhardt Bohny (1906–1963). 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 soon became one of the more popular actresses of the 1920s, appearing in Douglas Fairbanks' smash hit Technicolor film The Black Pirate (1926), as Rodeo West in The Painted Angel (1929), and The American Beauty (1927).

She married Irvin Willat, the director of her seventh film, in 1923. The two divorced in 1929. Dove had a legion of male fans, one of her more persistent was Howard Hughes. She had a three-year romance with Hughes and was engaged to marry him, but she ended the relationship.

Hughes cast her as a comedienne in his film Cock of the Air (1932). She also appeared in his movie The Age for Love (1931).

Dove was also a pilot, poet, and painter. a marriage that lasted for 35 years until his death in 1970. The couple had a son, Robert Alan Kenaston, Jr., who married actress Claire Kelly and died in 1995 from cancer, and an adopted daughter, Gail who briefly married media mogul Merv Adelson. Billie Dove later had a brief third marriage, in 1973, to architect John Miller, which ended in divorce.

Last years

Aside from a cameo in Diamond Head (1963), Dove never returned to the movies. She spent her retirement years in Rancho Mirage, then moved to the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California where she died of pneumonia on New Year's Eve 1997, aged 94.

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  • Photographs and bibliography for Billie Dove, film.virtual-history.com; accessed February 17, 2015.