Lina Basquette

Lina Basquette, born Lena Copeland Baskette on April 19, 1907, in San Mateo, California, was an American actress and dancer whose career in entertainment spanned approximately 75 years. She died on September 30, 1994. Her parents were Frank E. Baskette, a drugstore owner, and his wife Gladys Lee, née Rosenberg, Baskette. A Victor Talking Machine Company representative encountered the young Baskette dancing to a record in her father's store and hired her, through her parents, at age eight to advertise Victrolas at the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. She subsequently studied ballet. At nine years old, in 1916, she secured her first film contract with Universal Studios in Los Angeles for the silent film series Lena Baskette Featurettes. Shortly after she signed with Universal, her father committed suicide; Basquette later attributed his death to her mother's ambitions for fame and fortune.

Within a year of her father's death, Gladys Baskette married dance director Ernest Belcher. The couple had a daughter, Marjorie Belcher, born in 1919 in Los Angeles, who later became the dancer and choreographer known as Marge Champion, making her Basquette's half-sister.

In 1923, Basquette and her mother traveled by train to New York City so that she could audition for director John Murray Anderson. Anderson encouraged her to change the spelling of her surname from Baskette to Basquette, while producer Charles Dillingham changed the spelling of her first name from Lena to Lina, remarking that Lena was a cook and Lina was an artiste. Before she could sign with Anderson, however, Florenz Ziegfeld cast the sixteen-year-old Basquette as a featured dancer in his Ziegfeld Follies, and the production's team officially designated her America's Prima Ballerina. Russian prima ballerina Anna Pavlova took notice of Basquette and offered to mentor her in classical ballet, but her mother declined, judging that a ballet career would not be sufficiently lucrative. Basquette later said the decision broke her heart.

Her Broadway career ran from 1923 to 1927 and included appearances in the musical Jack and Jill, the revue Nifties of 1923, the revue Rufus LeMaire's Affairs, and the revue Ziegfeld Follies of 1918. By 1925, at age eighteen, she was appearing in two concurrent Ziegfeld productions. It was during a performance of Louie the 14th that film producer and Warner Bros. co-founder Sam Warner first saw her. Warner proposed marriage; Basquette was reluctant, as he was twenty years her senior, but her mother pressed her to accept, believing Warner to be wealthy despite Warner Bros. then losing money. The two married in July 1925, and Basquette grew to love and respect him. The couple had a daughter, Lita, in 1926. Warner died suddenly on October 5, 1927, the day before the opening of The Jazz Singer, a film he had worked on tirelessly. His death devastated Basquette, who subsequently spent years in legal battles with the Warner family over money and custody of her daughter.

Basquette returned to film work in 1928, appearing in four films that year and earning recognition as one of thirteen WAMPAS Baby Stars. In 1929 she appeared in The Younger Generation, directed by Frank Capra, and starred in the partial-sound film The Godless Girl, directed by Cecil B. DeMille. In that film she played Judith, the leader of a high school atheist society, a character based on Queen Silver, a child prodigy who made speeches as a socialist activist. During the filming of a climactic reformatory fire scene, DeMille insisted on realism, and Basquette's eyelashes and eyebrows were burned. The Godless Girl performed poorly at the box office in the United States but found success in Austria and Germany. Basquette later recalled receiving a fan letter from Adolf Hitler, written before he achieved political power, in which he named her his favorite movie star. The role of Judith remained the one for which she was most widely remembered.

Her film career declined after The Godless Girl, in part because she was unofficially blacklisted in Hollywood as a result of her ongoing legal disputes with the Warner family, who sought custody of her daughter and challenged the settlement of Sam Warner's estate. She nonetheless made a successful transition to sound films and appeared in a number of Western films during the 1930s. In January 1937, she was offered a contract with the Universum Film AG studio in Germany following the Nazi Party's rise to power. After arriving in Germany she was taken to Berchtesgaden, where she met Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, and Joseph Goebbels. She later claimed that Hitler made a pass at her, that she kicked him in the groin, and that when he persisted she informed him her maternal grandfather, Lazarus Rosenberg, was Jewish. She departed Germany the following day.

As film roles continued to diminish, Basquette returned to dancing, performing in nightclubs and on the vaudeville circuit. In 1939, she and her fifth husband, English actor Henry Mollison, appeared together on stage in Idiot's Delight, which toured the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Her final film appearance came in 1943's A Night for Crime, after which she retired from the screen. On August 9, 1943, Basquette was raped and robbed in Burbank, California, by a twenty-two-year-old army private named George Paul Rimke, to whom she had given a ride. Rimke denied the charges but was found guilty on August 26, 1943, and sentenced to life in prison.

In 1947, using money from a trust fund left to her by Sam Warner, Basquette purchased a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In 1950, she and her sixth husband, Warner Gilmore, opened Honey Hollow Kennels and began breeding and showing Great Danes. Basquette became the single biggest winner of Great Dane breed shows and wrote several books on dog breeding. She retired from dog handling in 1983 and subsequently moved to Wheeling, West Virginia, where she continued to judge dog shows for the American Kennel Club and wrote a monthly column for Kennel Review. Renewed public interest in her film work followed a profile published in The New Yorker in 1989, after which her films were screened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.