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
Intolérance (1916).
Bessie became popular with audiences and worked with
Douglas Fairbanks in
Terrible adversaire (1916) and
William S. Hart in
Pour sauver sa race (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
Les fraudeurs (1924), and also
began working on the stage. She performed the first screen "Charleston"
dance in
Incognito (1925),
and gave one of her best performances in
Son Beau Geste (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
Le voyage fantastique (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.
