Reine Davies


Reine Davies was an American singer and actress.

Life and career

Davies was born in Brooklyn, New York, on June 6, 1883. The eldest sister of actress Marion Davies, Reine was the first of the Douras daughters to start using the name Davies. One day she was driving through the Brooklyn neighborhood, and saw the office sign of Valentine Davies. She liked the name and adopted it, and the other sisters followed suit.
Davies married twice, first to director George Lederer , and later to actor George Regas. She had a son with Lederer, director/writer Charles Lederer, and a daughter, Josephine Rose Lederer.
She was known as "The New American Beauty," and, by her friends as, "The True Blue Girl". Reine Davies lived for many years in Chicago, and was on the Vaudeville circuit as a singer and actress. She appeared in the 1915 movie Sunday as Sunday and in 1917 as Beth Winthrop in The Sin Woman. She was also a popular subject on sheet music covers, most famously for "Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland", as well as "The Reine Waltz", "When I Kissed Your Tears Away", "Leaf by Leaf the Roses Fall", "When I Met You Last Night in Dreamland", "In the Palace of Dreams", and "Araby". For many years she edited the gossip column in the Los Angeles Examiner.
In 1935, Davies began writing a column about Hollywood social events for The San Francisco Examiner.
Davies died on April 5, 1938, in Beverly Hills, California, from a heart attack in a swimming pool. She was buried with a Requiem Mass at St. Augustine's Church in Culver City, California, and interred in the Douras Mausoleum in what is now Hollywood Forever Cemetery.