Biography

Cheeky, fresh-faced Adrienne Doré (with the aigu on the ‘e’) was born Elizabeth Himmelsbach in Spirit Lake, Idaho, on May 22, 1907 (though her success in shaving three years off her age means many biographies read 1910). Claiming an acting career from the age of three, Adrienne honed her dramatic chops in the Pacific Northwest through the arts of dance and violin before she and her parents descended on Hollywood in 1923 in order to test the waters. After cutting her teeth on beauty pageants and film extra work, she won a long-term contract as a young ingenue with Universal Studios in 1925, but quickly found her film career stagnating under their stewardship. In an attempt to keep the ball rolling with ‘good publicity’, Adrienne tried out for the 1925 Miss Los Angeles competition, eventually winning second place in the year’s Miss America pageant. She considered the episode nothing more than a shallow diversion from her dramatic and artistic ambitions, emphatically maintaining that beauty simply isn’t all it’s cracked up to be when asked about her title in later interviews.

Adrienne spent the second half of her film career shuttling between the major studios, making a brief flicker at Paramount with her most famous role as Babs, one of Clara Bow’s pack of party hounds in The Wild Party (1929). Having been given the boot from both Universal and Paramount, Adrienne flung her lasso in all directions, doing comedy shorts, stage work, and dance recitals before finding herself another filly in the Warner Brothers stable upon winning a long-term contract at the studio in 1931. Her roles there came with an abrupt change of pace from comedy to unsympathetic ‘bad girl’ typecasting that didn’t mesh well with her bubbly exterior; her option was dropped after bringing two snooty First National scapegoats to life, the snob sister in The Famous Ferguson Case, and homewrecking Allison Adair in The Rich Are Always with Us (both 1932).

Adrienne eloped with Blondie producer Burt Kelly in August 1932 and promptly slowed her film career to focus on the quiet of childless domesticity; she made only two more films before throwing in the towel for good when she failed to secure the role of Belle Watling in Gone with the Wind (1939). Adrienne D. Kelly spent the next fifty years of her life quietly married to Burt; she died at the Motion Picture & Television Hospital in Woodland Hills after a decade of widowhood on November 26, 1992, aged 85.

More in-depth details here:
Early Life (1907–1923)
A Blossoming Career (1924–1926)
Stage, Shorts, and Success (1927–1929)
‘Temptations’ and Warner Brothers (1930–1932)