Lola Lane

Lola Lane, born Dorothy Mullican on May 21, 1906, in Macy, Indiana, was an American actress and one of four performing sisters known collectively as the Lane Sisters, alongside Leota, Rosemary, and Priscilla Lane. She died on June 22, 1981, in Santa Barbara, California, at age 75 and was buried at Calvary Cemetery in Santa Barbara.

The daughter of a dentist, Lane grew up in Indianola, Iowa, where she played piano for silent films as a teenager and sang in a flower shop. Her professional path was set in motion when vaudeville entertainer Gus Edwards discovered her and her sister Leota at a benefit concert in Des Moines, Iowa. The two sisters had studied at a conservatory at Simpson College before making their way to New York, where they were performing by 1926. That year, Lane and Leota appeared in the Greenwich Village Follies in New York City. Edwards also changed Lane's name from Dorothy Mullican and incorporated her into his touring production, Ritz Carlton Nights.

Lane subsequently performed on the Orpheum, Loew, and Interstate vaudeville circuits before making her Broadway debut in The War Song in 1928. A talent scout who saw her in that production arranged a screen test, leading to her film debut in Speakeasy in 1929.

The majority of Lane's film work was produced by Warner Bros. She appeared alongside her sisters Priscilla and Rosemary in Four Daughters, Four Wives, and Four Mothers. Her Warner Bros. credits also include Marked Woman (1937), in which she appeared with Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart. Her screen career spanned from the 1920s through the 1940s.

In her personal life, Lane married actor Lew Ayres in Las Vegas, Nevada, on September 11, 1931; the marriage ended in 1933. She was also married to Henry Dunham, a yacht broker, and to director Roland West. Following West's death in 1952, she married Robert Hanlon, a retired aircraft executive. Like her sisters Rosemary and Priscilla, Lane was a Roman Catholic convert, and in 1967 she received a Pope Pius X medal for her work in the religious training of mentally challenged people.

Comic book writer Jerry Siegel named the DC Comics character Lois Lane, the Daily Planet reporter and Superman's girlfriend, after Lola Lane.