Lina Basquette: Prima Ballerina of a Life That Refused to Slow Down
Lina Basquette married eight times, buried a husband who co-founded Warner Bros. the day before his studio changed cinema forever, survived at least two suicide attempts, faced down Adolf Hitler in a Bavarian retreat by revealing her Jewish grandfather, and, at eighty-four, still had one more film role left in her. Few careers in American entertainment cover more emotional ground, or more decades, than hers.
A Prima Ballerina by Nine
Born Lena Copeland Baskette on 19 April 1907 in San Mateo, California, to drugstore owner Frank Baskette and Gladys Lee Rosenberg Baskette, she was performing publicly by age eight, hired by a Victor Talking Machine Company representative to advertise Victrolas at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. She began ballet training around the same time and, at just nine, signed her first film contract with Universal Studios for a series of shorts billed as the "Lena Baskette Featurettes." Her father died by suicide shortly after that contract was secured; her mother later married the dance director Ernest Belcher, whose daughter from that marriage, Marjorie — later famous as Marge Champion — would become one of the most influential dancer-choreographers in American film.
By 1923, the Broadway producer Charles Dillingham had rebranded her professionally, changing her first name from Lena to Lina with the explanation, "Lena is a cook, Lina is an artiste." Florenz Ziegfeld cast her as a featured dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies, where she earned the title "America's Prima Ballerina," and the Russian ballet legend Anna Pavlova reportedly offered to mentor her personally — an offer her mother turned down, choosing more immediately lucrative work over elite artistic development.
Marriage to a Warner Brother
At eighteen, while performing in the show *Louie the 14th*, Basquette was spotted by Sam Warner, co-founder of Warner Bros., twenty years her senior. Reluctant at first, she married him in July 1925 at her mother's urging, and the couple had a daughter, Lita, born in October 1926 and named after Charlie Chaplin's wife Lita Grey. The marriage ended abruptly: Sam Warner died on 5 October 1927 of complications from a sinusitis-related mastoid infection that spread to his brain — one day before *The Jazz Singer*, the film that launched the sound era, premiered under his studio's name.
The Godless Girl and an Unwanted Fan
Basquette's most enduring screen role came in Cecil B. DeMille's *The Godless Girl* (1929), in which she played Judith, a character modeled on the real-life child activist Queen Silver. DeMille's demand for realism during a reformatory fire scene left her with burned eyelashes and eyebrows. The film underperformed domestically but found real success in Austria and Germany, and Basquette later claimed to have received a fan letter — before his rise to power — from Adolf Hitler, who reportedly called her his favorite movie star.
That connection became far stranger in January 1937, when Basquette accepted a film contract with the German studio Universum Film AG and was driven to Hitler's Berchtesgaden retreat to meet Hitler, Rudolf Hess, and Joseph Goebbels in person. By her later account, Hitler made advances toward her, which she rebuffed by kicking him; when he persisted, she revealed that her maternal grandfather, Lazarus Rosenberg, was Jewish. She left Germany the following day.
Custody Battle and Blacklisting
Basquette's career declined sharply after *The Godless Girl*, a decline she attributed in part to an informal Hollywood blacklist tied to a bitter custody fight with the Warner family over her daughter Lita, whom the Warners sought to raise Jewish rather than Catholic. The Warners won custody in March 1930 after promising a $300,000 trust fund, and Basquette attempted suicide by poison when the custody ruling went against her. She would see her daughter only twice over the following two decades before the two reconciled in 1977.
Eight Marriages and a Wartime Assault
Basquette's personal life continued at a similarly intense pace. Beyond Sam Warner, she married the cinematographer Peverell Marley, the actor Ray Hallam — who died of leukemia three weeks after their wedding — Theodore Hayes, a former trainer of the boxer Jack Dempsey (whom she twice married and divorced, while claiming an affair with Dempsey himself), the British actor Henry Mollison, hotel manager Warner Gilmore, and the artist Frank Mancuso, among others, marrying eight times in total. On 9 August 1943, after giving a ride to a 22-year-old army private, George Paul Rimke, she was raped and robbed by him in Burbank; Rimke was convicted that August and sentenced to life imprisonment. She retired from film that same year after a small role in *A Night for Crime*, having spent the intervening years also performing on the nightclub and vaudeville circuit, including a 1939 international tour of *Idiot's Delight* with Mollison across the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.
A Second Career With Great Danes
In 1947, using funds from Sam Warner's trust, Basquette bought a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and in 1950, with her sixth husband, opened Honey Hollow Kennels, breeding Great Danes. She became, by the available account, the single largest winner of Great Dane breed shows in the country, publishing several books on dog breeding and eventually judging for the American Kennel Club and writing a monthly column for *Kennel Review* after retiring from show handling in 1983.
Why Lina Is Called a Genius
The available record supports a claim about a specific, physical form of talent rather than intellectual genius in the ordinary sense: Basquette was, by age nine, already a trained, publicly performing dancer of professional caliber, good enough to be singled out by Florenz Ziegfeld and courted by Anna Pavlova herself — one of the most demanding and selective judges of ballet talent in the world. That is a real and rare form of embodied skill: precocious physical control, timing, and stage presence developed years ahead of typical training schedules. It is honest to note that nothing in the sources gathered here shows critics or historians applying the word "genius" to Basquette directly, and that her greater fame rests less on any singular artistic achievement than on the sheer eventfulness and resilience of her life — surviving repeated personal catastrophe, reinventing herself successfully as a champion dog breeder, and returning to film at eighty-four. Her later Great Dane breeding success, described as making her the sport's biggest winner, suggests the same trait recurring in a completely different field: an unusual capacity to master a demanding, competitive discipline and rise to its top tier more than once in one lifetime.
Legacy
A 1989 *New Yorker* profile revived interest in her films, which were subsequently screened at the National Gallery of Art and the Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles, and in 1991 she published her autobiography, *Lina: DeMille's Godless Girl*, the same year she took her first film role in forty-eight years, in the independent production *Paradise Park*, playing a grandmother alongside Porter Wagoner and Johnny Paycheck. Basquette died of lymphoma on 30 September 1994 in Wheeling, West Virginia, at eighty-seven, and holds a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1529 Vine Street, recognition for a career spanning some seventy-five years across silent film, sound pictures, vaudeville, and championship dog breeding.
