Betty Compton

Betty Compton, born Violet Halling Compton on May 13, 1906, in Sandown, Isle of Wight, England, was an actress and singer whose Broadway career spanned the mid-to-late 1920s. At the age of seven, she relocated to Canada with her parents before eventually settling in New York City, where she studied singing under Estelle Liebling.

Compton's Broadway work ran from 1924 to 1929 and included appearances in several notable productions of the era. She was a member of the Ziegfeld Follies and took part in the original stage production of Funny Face in 1927, which featured Fred Astaire and Adele Astaire. The following year she appeared in the musical Oh, Kay!, and her other Broadway credits included Hold Everything, The City, and Fifty Million Frenchmen.

Her personal life involved four marriages. She had received a divorce from a first marriage in 1923. On February 16, 1931, she married film dialog director Edward D. Dowling in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and the two were divorced in that same city on March 20, 1931. On April 18, 1933, Compton married New York City mayor Jimmy Walker in Cannes, France. She and Walker adopted two children, a son named James J. Walker II and a daughter named Mary Ann Walker. Compton initiated divorce proceedings against Walker in 1940, and the divorce was finalized on March 15, 1941, in Key West. On May 11, 1942, she married West Point graduate and consulting engineer Theodore Knappen in Jersey City, her fourth marriage. The couple had one son, Theodore Compton Knappen, born January 19, 1944, the only child Compton bore herself.

According to Knappen, Compton's health declined following the birth of their son. She died on July 12, 1944, at Doctors Hospital in New York City at the age of 38.