She legally changed her name to Lillian Bohny in the early 1920s and moved to Hollywood, where she began appearing in silent films.

She soon became one of the more popular actresses of the 1920s, appearing in Douglas Fairbanks' smash hit Technicolor film The Black Pirate (1926), as Rodeo West in The Painted Angel (1929), and The American Beauty (1927).

She married wealthy oil executive Robert Alan Kenaston in 1935,[9] a marriage that lasted for 35 years until his death in 1970.

She spent her retirement years in Rancho Mirage, then moved to the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California where she died of pneumonia on New Year's Eve 1997, aged 94.

Jazz singer Billie Holiday took her professional pseudonym from Dove as an admirer of the actress.