The only child of William "Billy" Burke, a singing clown in the Barnum and Bailey circus, Mary William Ethelbert Appleton Burke adopted her father's nickname before making her debut on the London stage in 1903. The family had moved to London when Billie was eight, and she received her education in England and in France. She appeared on the English stage for four years, then, after her father's death, she was brought to New York in 1907 to star opposite John Drew in My Wife. A delicate beauty of piquant personality, she soon was the toast of Broadway. Celebrities like Mark Twain, Enrico Caruso, James M. Barrie, and W. Somerset Maugham were among her backstage admirers. In 1913 the latter escorted her to a New Year's Eve party at the Astor Hotel, where she met Florenz Ziegfeld. The following year the producer and the actress eloped and were married in a Hoboken, New Jersey, parsonage. Until Ziegfeld's death in 1932 they lived in a Hastings-on-Hudson estate, surrounded by a menagerie that included an elephant, two bears, two lion cubs, 15 dogs, and a herd of deer. In 1915, Miss Burke accepted an offer of $300,000 from film pioneer Thomas H. Ince to appear in the film PEGGY (1916). She went on to star in about a dozen silent films, with Ziegfeld acting as her agent. In 1921 she returned to Broadway. In 1931, in an attempt to help her husband financially -- he had been wiped out by the 1929 crash -- she went back to Hollywood and into sound films. She played some leads and scores of delightful supporting roles in her new screen image as a feather-brained, twittery comedienne. In 1936 she acted as an advisor on the film THE GREAT ZIEGFELD (1936), in which she was portrayed by Myrna Loy. In 1949 she wrote an autobiography, With a Feather on My Nose.    Nominated for Supporting Actress 1938: MERRILY WE LIVE 1 nomination