Star Facts
  • Category Motion Pictures

    Address 6530 Hollywood Blvd.

    Ceremony date 02/08/1960

About
John Boles
Born:
1895-10-28,
Greenville,
Texas,
USA
Education:
University of tx
Ethnicity:
Caucasian
Death Date:
1969-02-27
Addition Websites

John Boles

John Love Boles was an American actor. Boles was born in Greenville, Texas, into a middle-class family. He graduated with honors from the University of Texas in 1917 and married Marielite Dobbs in that same year. His parents wanted him to be a doctor and Boles studied and finally got his B.A. degree, but the stage called. John Boles preferred acting and singing, and he demonstrated talents for them from an early age and this won him a place alongside Gloria Swanson when she chose him to play in film with her. During World War I, he was a US spy in Germany, Bulgaria, and Turkey.

He started out in Hollywood in the silent movie era, but became a huge star with the advent of talkies. After the war, Boles moved to New York to study music. He quickly became well-known for his talents and was selected to play the leading man in the 1923 Broadway musical Little Jesse James. He became an established star on Broadway and attracted the attention of Hollywood producers and actors.

He was hired by MGM to appear in a silent film in 1924. He starred in two more films for that studio before returning to New York and the stage. In 1927, he returned to Hollywood to star in The Love of Sunya opposite Gloria Swanson, which was a huge success for him. Unfortunately, because the movies were still silent he was unable to show off his singing ability until late in the decade. In 1929, the Warner Brothers hired him to star in their lavish musical operetta The Desert Song. This film featured sequences in Technicolor and was a box-office success. Soon after, Radio Pictures selected him to play the leading man in their extravagant production of Rio Rita, opposite Bebe Daniels. Audiences were enthralled by his beautiful voice, and John Boles suddenly found himself in huge demand. RCA Victor even hired him to make phonograph records of songs that he had sung in his films.

As soon as Rio Rita was completed, Boles went back to Warner Brothers as the leading man in an even more extravagant musical entitled Song of the West that was filmed entirely in Technicolor. Shortly after this film, Universal Pictures offered John Boles a contract, which he accepted. He starred in a number of pictures for them, most notably the all-Technicolor musical revue entitled The King of Jazz and a historical operetta entitled Captain of the Guard. In 1931, he starred in One Heavenly Night, which would prove to be his last major musical.

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