Dove was born Bertha Bohny in New York City in 1903 to Charles and Bertha (née Kagan) Bohny, who were both Jewish immigrants. As a teen, she worked as a model to help support her family and was hired as a teenager by Florenz Ziegfeld to appear in his Ziegfeld Follies Revue. She legally changed her name to Lillian Bohny in the early 1920s and moved to Hollywood, where she began appearing in silent films. She soon became one of the more popular actresses of the 1920s, appearing in Douglas Fairbanks' smash hit Technicolor film "The Black Pirate" (1926), as Rodeo West in "The Painted Angel" (1929), and "The American Beauty" (1927).