Trouvé cet article sur Lina Basquette
From the Daily Telegraph , 13th October 1994 :
Lina Basquette , who has died at Wheeling , West Virginia , aged 87 , was a silent movie star with a noisy private life.
In 1929 Adolf Hitler wrote her a fan letter in which he declared that she is his favourite American movie star. Eight years later , when the Fuhrer ruled the Third Reich , he invited her to Berchtesgaden , where he urgently pressed his attentions."The man repelled me so much ," she recounted , "He had terrible body odour; he was flatulent. But he had a sweet smile , and above all he had these strange , penetrating eyes." Not penetrating enough, though , for Basquette , who related that she was obliged to curb his enthusiasm by kicking him in the groin.When that failed to deter his advances she told him that she was partly Jewish .
  She was born Lena Baskette at San Mateo, California , in 1907. Her mother determined to push her into show business , so that the girl was only eight when she starred as a baby ballerina on the Victor Talking Machine stand at the San Francisco World Fair. Shortly afterwards her father , liberally plied with dirnk by the Hollywood mogul Carl Laemmle Snr., signed a contract under which Lena was bound to Universal for six years , at $50 a week. She starres in the Lena Baskette Featurettes , and appeared as a child in longer films such as Shoes (1916) and Penrod(1922).Meanwhile her father had commited suicide , a tragedy for which Lena was inclined to blame her mother 's greed for money. But she liked her new stepfather , Ernest Belcher , while her new half-sister would become famous as the dancer and choreographer Marge Champion.
Lena 's own dancing had been admired by Anna Pavlova , and in 1923 she left films and became leading dancer for the Ziegfeld Follies. It was at this time that she changed her name to Lina Basquette . "Lena is a cook", a producer explained , "Lina is an artiste." Il 1925 she married Sam Warner , one of the Warner Bros. , who had admired her on Broadway in Louie the 14th. She would later claim to have encouraged his interest in "talkies" , and to have urged him to engage Al Jolson for the first sound feature. Sam Warner died the day before the premiere of The Jazz Singer (1927) , and Basquette embarked on a prolonged and expensive campaign against the Warner family to secure both her inheritance and the custody of her daughter. Her failure led in 1930 to a well-publicised suicide attempt. Meanwhile her sultry good looks had once more graced the screen , in Ranger of the North(1927), Serenade (1927) , The Noose (1928) , Wheel of Chance (1928) , Celebrity  (1928) , Show Folks (1928) , The Younger Generation (1929) and Come Across (1929) . Her own favourite part was in The Godless Girl (1929) , Cecil B. DeMille's last silent film ; she played a high-school drop-out who was sent to jail.
Basquette 's work in Hollywood did not interrupt her matrimonial carrer . Her husbands included Peverell marley , a cameraman on The Godless Girl  , and the boxer Jack Dempsey's trainer . This led to a torured entanglement with Dempsey himself , and another suicide attempt.
By now Basquette was appearing only in minor films , such as Hard Hombre (1931) , Morals for Women (1931) , and The Final Hour (1936) . Shortly before the Second World War she toured the world in various plays , and in 1943 made her last film , A Night for Crime.
In the same year she brought charges of rape and assault against a 22- year old soldier , who was sent to prison for 20 years.
She was now having an affair with a Japanese man ; later she dropped hints that she had been invloved in espionage and claimed to have had advance knowledge of the attack on Pearl Harbour.
After the Second World War she settled down on an estate in Bucks County , Pennsylvania , where she bred champion Great Danes and wrote several books on the subject. She also published an autobiography , Lina : De Mill's Godless Girl (1991) .
Estimates as to number of Basquette's marriages vary from six to nine. She had a son and daughter.