Bessie Love(1898-1986)
- Actress
- Script and Continuity Department
- Writer
Bessie Love was born in Texas. Her cowboy father moved the family to
Hollywood, where he became a chiropractor. As the family needed money,
Bessie's mother sent her to Biograph Studios, hoping she would become
an actress. D.W. Griffith saw she
was pretty and had some acting talent, and put her in several of his
films, also giving her a small part in
Intolerance (1916).
Bessie became popular with audiences and worked with
Douglas Fairbanks in
Reggie Mixes In (1916) and
William S. Hart in
The Aryan (1916). She then moved to
Vitagraph and starred in a number of comedy-dramas. In the 1920s she
began to act in more mature roles, such as
Those Who Dance (1924), and also
began working on the stage. She performed the first screen "Charleston"
dance in
The King on Main Street (1925),
and gave one of her best performances in
Dress Parade (1927). When sound
movies came into vogue, she made a number of them and received an
Academy Award nomination for
The Broadway Melody (1929).
By 1931, however, her career was over. She moved to England in 1935 and
entertained the troops during World War II. By the 1950s she started
playing small roles in movies such as
No Highway in the Sky (1951). She played in a
handful of low-budget films from the 1950s through the 1970s. In the
1980s she appeared in the big-budget
Ragtime (1981) which starred
James Cagney, and later that year in
Reds (1981) which starred
Warren Beatty.
