Betty Browne

About Betty Browne

Betty Browne was an American screenwriter and stage actress primarily known for writing intertitles for comedy shorts during Hollywood's silent era.

Betty was born in New York City to Mr. Browne (who died when she was an infant) and Aimee Fitzgerald. She was the granddaughter of former Supreme Court Justice Edward Browne.

Betty started out her career in entertainment as an actress and a Ziegfeld girl. She married Australian actor and Broadway producer Leslie Casey in New York City in 1918. She later married fellow screenwriter Gene Towne for a time; the pair had a daughter before divorcing.

At the age of fifteen she made her Broadway debut in The Passing Show Of 1915. Then she joined the cast of The Ziegfeld Follies. Betty also starred in Ziegfeld's Nine O'Clock Review. On January 3, 1918 she married theatrical producer Leslie Casey. She appeared in the Broadway shows The Little Blue Devil, The Magic Melody, and The Rose Of Stamboul. During the early 1920s she began writing articles for fan magazines like Picture Play. In 1927 she was hired by Mack Sennett to write title cards (the descriptive text that appears in silent films).

Betty wrote title cards for more than a dozen comedies including The Bargain Hunt, Taxi Spooks, and Love At First Flight. She was one of a small number of female writers working in Hollywood at that time. After divorcing her husband she married screenwriter Gene Towne. Their daughter, Betty Gene, was born in 1929. The family lived in Los Angeles and she gave up her career to be a housewife. Unfortunately her marriage to Gene ended in 1939. Betty married George L. Kehner, a Merchant Marine, in 1945 but they divorced a few years later. As she grew older she began suffering from diabetes. On December 28, 1959 Betty died from a heart attack at the age of fifty-nine. She was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.