Nina Byron (born Nina Clarice Betts;July 27, 1900 – January 21, 1987) was a New Zealand–American silent film actress and showgirl.
Film actress
Byron was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1900 to George Arthur Betts and his wife, Grace (Goodman) Betts. She traveled to the United States and made her first film with William S. Hart in the 1917 production Truthful Tulliver.[1]
Byron was a member of the Ziegfeld Follies during 1923 and 1924. She was also featured in the 1924 Broadway musical Paradise Alley.[4]
Personal life
Byron met her first husband, Nicholas Dunaew, in New York City. Dunaew, a Russian silent film actor,
[5] claimed to have met Byron in 1916 and brought her and her mother to Los Angeles, where the couple married in 1918. According to Dunaew, they separated in 1920 after she left him. Unhappy with Byron's "reprehensible conduct," Dunaew asked for a divorce, stating: “She has treated me even as her mother treated her father. She left him in New Zealand, and when she heard that he had committed suicide, she laughed; Nina also laughed—these
women who had practically killed a man with cruelty laughed at his action in putting himself out of his misery."[6]
Her second marriage was to cinematographer Harold Rosson in 1924. The two divorced in 1926, and she married set designer Frank Hotaling in 1939, to whom she remained married until his death.
