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- Actor
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- Soundtrack
George Sanders was born of English parents in St. Petersburg, Russia. He worked in a Birmingham textile mill, in the tobacco business and as a writer in advertising. He entered show business in London as a chorus boy, going from there to cabaret, radio and theatrical understudy. His film debut, in 1936, was as Curly Randall in Find the Lady (1936). His U.S. debut, the same year, with Twentieth Century-Fox, was as Lord Everett Stacy in Lloyd's of London (1936). During the late 1930s and early 1940s he made a number of movies as Simon Templar--the Saint--and as Gay Lawrence, the Falcon. He played Nazis (Maj. Quive-Smith in Fritz Lang's Man Hunt (1941)), royalty (Charles II in Otto Preminger's Forever Amber (1947)), and biblical roles (Saran of Gaza in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949)). He won the 1950 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as theatre critic Addison De Witt in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve (1950). In 1957 he hosted a TV series, The George Sanders Mystery Theater (1957). He continued to play mostly villains and charming heels until his suicide in 1972.- Actress
- Soundtrack
The daughter of a lawyer, Ouspenskaya studied singing at the Warsaw Conservatory and acting at Adasheff's School of the Drama in Moscow. She received her practical training as an actress touring in the Russian provinces. She later joined the Moscow Art Theatre. It was here that she first worked under the direction of the great Konstantin Stanislavski, whose "Method" she would go on to promote for the remainder of her life. She came to America with the Art Theatre in 1922 and, upon their return to Moscow, defected to the US to become a dominant Broadway actress for more than a decade until she founded the School of Dramatic Art in New York in 1929. It was to help keep the school funded that she accepted her first Hollywod film, Dodsworth (1936). She had appeared in six silent movies in Russia earlier in her career. This lucrative association, for Ouspenskaya, Hollywood and the viewing public, would last for more than a dozen years and two dozen films. Thanks to her often-superior demeanor and addiction to astrology, she could prove maddening on the set. She remained in nearly daily communication with L.A. Times' astrologer Carroll Righter who would advise her on the best times to appear on camera along with when and where to travel. As a consequence, most casts and crews disliked the over-bearing, wispy 90-pound actress intensely. She bounced between prestigious A-pictures (Love Affair (1939), Waterloo Bridge (1940)) and B-movies (Mystery of Marie Roget (1942), Tarzan and the Amazons (1945)), performing, and behaving, with equal intensity. She is especially notable for having appeared in the last great Universal horror entry, The Wolf Man (1941) and the interesting Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). A heavy smoker, she fell asleep in bed with a lit cigarette in late November 1949 and suffered massive burns. She died of a stroke in the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital three days later.- Actor
- Director
- Soundtrack
George Gaynes was born in Helsinki in May, 1917, which was then the capital of the Grand Duchy of Finland. The Grand Duchy was part of the Russian Empire, which was in a state of collapse at the time of Gaynes' birth. The Emperor Nicholas II of Russia had abdicated the throne on March 15, two months prior to Gaynes' birth, and the Empire was in the process of splintering.
His family left the country, and George was primarily raised in France, England, and Switzerland. Neither of his parents was Finnish. His father Gerrit Jongejans was a Dutch businessman, and his mother Iya Grigorievna de Gay was a Russian artist. George attended college in the vicinity of Lausanne, Switzerland and graduated in 1937. He then attended a music school in Milan, Italy for about a year.
In 1940, George Gaynes was living in France, during the time of the Battle of France in World War II. The Battle ended in defeat for the French Third Republic and the country was occupied by Nazi Germany. George attempted to flee the occupation authorities, by crossing the Pyrenees mountains into neutral Spain. He was arrested by the Spanish authorities for illegally crossing the border, but was soon released.
In 1943, George joined the Royal Netherlands Navy. With the Netherlands under German occupation, the headquarters of the Navy had moved to London, in the United Kingdom. George had no previous military experience, but he was noticed for multilingual skills. He fluently spoke Dutch, English, French, Italian and Russian. He was soon detached to the (British) Royal Navy to serve as a translator.
During his naval service in World War II, George took part in the Allied invasion of Sicily, the Battle of Anzio in the Italian Campaign, and the Adriatic Campaign. The War ended in 1945 and George was honorably discharged in July, 1946. His highest military rank was that of a sergeant.
In 1946, George briefly returned to living in France. He was approached by an American theater director with the offer to play a part in a musical. He took the offer and moved to New York City, where he started appearing in Broadway musicals. He applied for American citizenship and officially became a citizen in 1948.
From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, George Gaynes was primarily a theatrical actor. His roles included various musicals, dramas, and comedies. One of his better-known roles was that of Henry Higgins in the theatrical version of ''My Fair Lady'', which went on a successful tour in 1964.
In the early 1960s, George started appearing as a character actor in various television series. He was also offered a number of film roles. His career unexpectedly took off in the 1980s, with a major part in the television series Punky Brewster (1985) and another one in the then-popular film series "Police Academy" from 1984 to 1994. In Police Academy (1984), his role was that of Commandant Eric Lassard, the titular leader of the Academy. He played the role in all 7 films of the series, though he only had a featured part in the fifth film. This was probably his most memorable role and gained him celebrity recognition for the first time.
In the 1990s, his career slowed down again, with only a few film appearances. He only played in a single film through the 2000s, Just Married (2003), and then retired. He was 86-years-old and could no longer play physically demanding roles. He spend 13 years in retirement before he died of natural causes in 2016.- Actress
- Producer
- Writer
The grand, highly flamboyant Russian star Alla Nazimova of Hollywood silent films lived an equally grand, flamboyant life off-camera, though her legendary status has not held up as firmly as that of a Rudolph Valentino today.
Alla Nazimova was born Miriam Edez Adelaida Leventon in 1879, in Yalta, Crimea, in the Russian Empire, to Jewish parents, Sonya Horowitz and Yakov Leventon. She was the third child in an abusive, contentious household. Most of her sad childhood was spent in foster homes or in the care of other relatives and she showed a strong penchant for outrageous behavior to cope. Nazimova also showed a great aptitude for music at a young age and began violin lessons at age seven. She changed her name to Alla Nazimova when she began appearing on stage--her father insisted on it, as "performing" was not considered respectable at the time.
She began acting lessons at age 17 and joined Konstantin Stanislavski's company of actors as a pupil of his "method style" at the Moscow Art Theatre. During that time she supported herself by being kept by rich, older men. A failed love affair led to her only marriage, to an acting student named Sergei Golovin, but they separated quickly. She grew discontented with Stanislavsky and later performed in repertory. She met the legendary Pavel Orlenev, a close friend of Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky, and entered into both a personal and professional relationship with him. They toured internationally throughout Europe with great success and came to New York in 1905, where Nazimova was saluted on Broadway for her definitive interpretations of Henrik Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler" and "A Doll's House." Orlenev returned to Russia but Nazimova stayed.
She made her screen debut with War Brides (1916), which was initially a 35-minute play. By 1918 she was a box-office star for Metro Pictures and completed 11 films for the studio over a three-year period. A torrid, stylish and rather outré tragedienne who played exotic, liberal women confronted by great personal anguish, she earned personal successes as a reformed prostitute in Revelation (1918), a suicide in Toys of Fate (1918) and dual roles as half-sisters during the Boxer Rebellion in The Red Lantern (1919), not to mention the title role of Camille (1921) with Rudolph Valentino. At the same time she maintained a strong Broadway theatrical career.
In accordance with her rise in the film industry, she began producing her own efforts, which were bold and experimental--and monumental failures, although they are hailed as great artistic efforts today. Her Salomé (1922) was quite scandalous and deemed a failure at the time. The monetary losses she suffered as producer were astronomical. The Hays Code, which led to severe censorship in pictures, also led to her downfall, as did her outmoded acting style. She was forced to abandon films for the theater, scoring exceptionally well in Anton Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard." She did return to films briefly in the 1940s in a variety of supporting roles, but she made these solely for the money.
Nazimova's private life has long been the subject of industry gossip. As a Hollywood cover to her well-known bisexual lifestyle, she coexisted in a "marriage" with gay actor Charles Bryant for well over a decade. Her "Garden of Allah" home was the centerpiece for many glamorous private parties. She died in 1945.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Pola Negri was born in Lipno, Poland, and moved to Warsaw as a child. Living in poverty with her mother, a teenage Pola auditioned and was accepted to the Imperial Ballet. Due to an illness that ended her dancing career, she soon switched to the Warsaw Imperial Academy of Dramatic Arts and became an actress. By 17 she was a star on the Warsaw stage, but World War I would soon change the theater scene. Without the theater, Pola turned to films. With her new career in pictures and her stage success in "Sumurun", she went to Berlin and was teamed with German director Ernst Lubitsch. The Lubitsch-Negri combination was very successful and the roles that Pola played were earthy, exotic, strong women. One of her films, Passion (1919), was optioned and retitled "Passion" for exhibition in America. The film was such a success that by 1922 she and Lubitsch were both given contracts to work in Hollywood. While her first few films showed some success, they were overshadowed by her reported romances with such stars as Charles Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino. Forbidden Paradise (1924), made with Lubitsch, and Hotel Imperial (1927) were two of her more successful films. However, three things conspired to end her career in Hollywood: (1) The perception that her mourning for Rudolph Valentino was insincere, though Negri did describe him as the love of her life; (2) The Hays Office codes that would not allow her to show the very traits that made her a sex-siren in Europe; (3) Her thick Polish accent would not play in the sound pictures that were coming into vogue.
Pola Negri returned to Europe and eventually made films for UFA, which was under Nazi management. In 1941 she returned to America penniless. She made Hi Diddle Diddle (1943) and became an American citizen in 1951. Her next and last movie was The Moon-Spinners (1964).
She died of pneumonia in San Antonio, TX, in 1987.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Tom Conway played "The Falcon" in ten of that series' entries. He starred in three Val Lewton horror classics. He appeared in comedies, musicals, two Tarzan films and even science fiction films.
He was early television's Detective Mark Saber, but Conway will probably be best remembered as George Sanders' brother.
Born into a wealthy family in pre-Bolshevik Revolution Russia, Thomas Charles Sanders might have followed his father as a rope manufacturer and inherited several estates. Had the family not been forced to flee to England, the brothers Sanders may never have added their names to the Hollywood saga.
But the Russian Revolution came, and Tom (age 13), George (age 11), sister Margaret (age 5), together with their parents, fled to England, leaving most of their wealth in the hands of the Bolsheviks.
The brothers attended Dunhurst and Bedales, private schools, and eventually Brighton College.
After college, Tom went to Northern Rhodesia where he worked in gold, copper and asbestos mines and even attempted ranching. Frustrated and "pretty well fed up to the teeth" with his failures, he borrowed passage home. In England, Conway worked as an engineer in a carburetor company and later sold safety glass.
He was discovered by a representative from a little theater group who persuaded him to join them. Conway eventually worked for the Manchester Repertory Company and toured with them in over twenty-five plays. He also appeared in BBC radio broadcasts.
Brother George persuaded him to come to Hollywood. To prevent confusion on the part of the public, they tossed a coin to see who would have to change his name. Tom lost, thereby becoming Tom Conway.
Conway began work at MGM, eventually appearing as a contract player in twelve films there, including a bit part in Mrs. Miniver (1942).
Brother George, tiring of B-film appearances in RKO's Falcon series and with better roles at two studios looming on the horizon, offered Tom his first big break. In The Falcon's Brother (1942), George was conveniently eliminated by a Nazi sniper so that Tom, as Tom Lawrence, could inherit the role. Conway played the role with even greater success than that of his brother in the next ten installments, concluding with The Falcon's Adventure (1946).
During those years, he also appeared in Val Lewton's Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and The Seventh Victim (1943). These led to two major film appearances, Universal's One Touch of Venus (1948), with Ava Gardner and Eve Arden and Warner Brothers' Painting the Clouds with Sunshine (1951).
Amidst the collapse of the studio system, Tom found his opportunities shrinking. There were to be no further major roles for him. His next film was Bride of the Gorilla (1951).
Alert to new possibilities for work, he accepted the part of homicide detective Mark Saber in the television series, Mark Saber (1951). Conway also made several mystery films in England during the same period. He played a cameo role as a bearded and be-wigged Sir Kay in Prince Valiant (1954) with two brief lines.
Back in the states, there were guest appearances on TV's Rawhide (1959), Adventures in Paradise (1959), and Perry Mason (1957).
In October, 1957, Tom turned in a brilliant performance as ventriloquist Max Collodi in Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955) chilling tale "The Glass Eye". He appeared regularly as the boyfriend on the The Betty Hutton Show (1959).
Conway also lent his voice to One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961). His final appearance was an uncredited part, in What a Way to Go! (1964).
Failing eyesight and prolonged bouts with alcohol took their toll on Conway in his last years. His second wife, Queenie Leonard divorced him in 1963. George Sanders broke off all contact with him over his drinking.
Conway underwent cataract surgery during the winter of 1964/65. In September of 1965 Tom briefly returned to the headlines when he was discovered living in a $2-a-day room in a Venice, California flophouse. Gifts, contributions and offers of aid poured in - for a time. Conway, still standing tall and trim, his hair now white, peered owl-like through thick-lensed glasses at the newspaper cameras.
His last years were marked with further visits to the hospital. It was there that former sister-in-law Zsa Zsa Gabor visited him one day and gave him $200. "Tip the nurses a little bit so they'll be good to you," she told him. The following day, the hospital called her to say that Conway had left with the $200, gone to his girlfriend's and died in her bed.- Ms. Locke became the toast of Broadway's 1937 season when she starred with John Garfield in "Having a Wonderful Time", the Arthur Kober comedy. She was critically acclaimed as Ophelia in the Maurice Evans production of "Hamlet". Her other Broadway plays included "Fifth Column," with Lee J. Cobb, and "Clash by Night", with Tallulah Bankhead.
- Director
- Writer
- Editor
The son of an affluent architect, Eisenstein attended the Institute of Civil Engineering in Petrograd as a young man. With the fall of the tsar in 1917, he worked as an engineer for the Red Army. In the following years, Eisenstein joined up with the Moscow Proletkult Theater as a set designer and then director. The Proletkult's director, Vsevolod Meyerhold, became a big influence on Eisenstein, introducing him to the concept of biomechanics, or conditioned spontaneity. Eisenstein furthered Meyerhold's theory with his own "montage of attractions"--a sequence of pictures whose total emotion effect is greater than the sum of its parts. He later theorized that this style of editing worked in a similar fashion to Marx's dialectic. Though Eisenstein wanted to make films for the common man, his intense use of symbolism and metaphor in what he called "intellectual montage" sometimes lost his audience. Though he made only seven films in his career, he and his theoretical writings demonstrated how film could move beyond its nineteenth-century predecessor--Victorian theatre-- to create abstract concepts with concrete images.- Actor
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
A minor prototype of the "Runyon-esque" character for more than three decades, Polish-born actor George E. Stone (né Gerschon Lichtenstein, on May 18, 1903) was, in actuality, a close friend of writer Damon Runyan and would play scores of colorful "dees, dem and dos" cronies throughout the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. With great names such as Johnnie the Shiek, Boots Burnett, Ice Box Hamilton, Wires Kagel, Ropes McGonigle, Society Max, and Toothpick Charlie, Stone delighted audiences in scores of crimers for decades.
A vaudeville and Broadway hoofer in the interim, the runt-sized Stone (5'3") finally scored in his first "grownup" part as the Sewer Rat in the silent drama 7th Heaven (1927) starring the once-popular romantic pair Charles Farrell and (Academy Award winner) Janet Gaynor. As "Georgie" sounded too child-like, he began billing himself as "George E. Stone." From there he was featured in a number of "tough guy" potboilers, particularly for Warner Bros. So typed was he as a henchman or thug, that he found few films outside the genre. His gunsels often possessed a yellow streak and could be both broadly comic or threatening in nature, with more than a few of them ending up on a morgue slab before film's end, including his Earl Williams on The Front Page (1931) and Otero in the classic gangster flick Little Caesar (1931).
Included in George's many films were a number of Oscar-quality pictures , including The Racket (1928), Cimarron (1931), Five Star Final (1931), 42nd Street (1933), Viva Villa! (1934), Anthony Adverse (1936), North West Mounted Police (1940), Pickup on South Street (1953), The Robe (1953), Broken Lance (1954), The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), Guys and Dolls (1955), Some Came Running (1958), Some Like It Hot (1959), Pocketful of Miracles (1961). Arguably, Stone's most popular, if not prolific, role was when he replaced Charles Wagenheim as The Runt in the second of the "Boston Blackie" film series, Confessions of Boston Blackie (1941) that starred Chester Morris as the title detective. The series lasted eight years.
Suffering from failing eyesight in later years, George was virtually blind by the late 1950s but, thanks to friends, managed to secure sporadic film and TV work. From 1958 on, Stone could be glimpsed in a recurring role on the popular courtroom series Perry Mason (1957) as a court clerk. Married to second wife Marjorie Ramey in 1946, 64-year-old George died following a stroke on May 26, 1967 in Woodland Hills, California, and was survived by two sisters.- Writer
- Actress
- Editorial Department
Ayn Rand was born on 2 February 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russian Empire [now Russia]. She was a writer and actress, known for The Night of January 16th (1941), The Fountainhead (1949) and We the Living (1942). She was married to Frank O'Connor. She died on 6 March 1982 in New York City, New York, USA.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Though born in Georgia and having a Russian-sounding name, Akim Tamiroff is actually of Armenian descent. At 19 he decided to pursue acting as a career and was chosen from among 500 applicants to the Moscow Art Theater School. There he studied under the great Konstantin Stanislavski, and launched a stage career. This included road company productions, in one such tour in 1920 Tamiroff came to New York City, which he liked so much he decided to stay there. Broadway suited him, and he worked steadily with the Theatre Guild from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s. He was a short, stout man with a guttural baritone voice and a thick but rather generic Russian accent that, with his skill in characterizations, seemed to mesh with any role calling for a foreign type--whether European, West Asian or even East Asian. His voice became his principal asset. He came west to Hollywood in 1932 to break into the movie business, and first appeared on screen in a bit part in Okay America! (1932). Until 1934 his appearances were usually uncredited, but he managed to stand out in several films, one of his best roles of the time being the servant Pedro of John Gilbert Queen Christina (1933). By early 1934 he was much in demand, appearing in 12 films during that year. The next year was even busier for him, with roles in 15 films altogether, and not just bit parts--he was getting more feature supporting roles, such as Gopal the emir in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) and the comic puppet master Rudolpho in the adapted operetta Naughty Marietta (1935). He signed with Paramount in 1936 but was often loaned out to other studios. He went to Warner Bros. for one of his earliest big supporting characters: the sly Cuban mercantile agent Carlo Cibo in Anthony Adverse (1936). For Paramount, his General Yang in The General Died at Dawn (1936) brought him his first of two Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor. Along with substantial supporting roles in top movies, Tamiroff was getting starring roles in "B" pictures, allowing him to show his range by playing everything from amiable rogues to thoroughly evil villains. Two of his roles from that time exemplify what a versatile actor he was. As French trapper and scout Dan Duroc of North West Mounted Police (1940), he was something of a rascal but with a sense of humor and dignity. However, as the vile Colonna in The Corsican Brothers (1941), he is irredeemably wicked, and deservedly dies in the longest sword duel on film. For his role as the self-serving guerrilla Pablo in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), Tamiroff received his second Oscar nomination. He continued through the decade with more fine work, and in 1949 he joined the cast of Black Magic (1949) and met Orson Welles, who played late 18th-century charlatan Cagliostro. The two became friends and associates in Welles' later film projects. Through the 1950s Tamiroff's time was fairly divided between T.V. productions and films earlier in the decade and a surprising number of episodic TV and more films later. His three films with Welles, as director and sometime actor, were: Confidential Report (1955) with its Wellesian maze of flash-backs; the over-the-top Touch of Evil (1958) with its gritty surrealism and incredible cast; and The Trial (1962) (The Trial), Welles' stylistic spin on the Franz Kafka story. Certainly it was in "Touch of Evil" that Tamiroff's Tijuana boss Uncle Joe Grandi--outlandishly bug-eyed alternately with fear or mercurial anger intensified by Welles' wild camera angles--stood out as a most intriguing character. He took a last fling at Broadway in 1959. For the 1960s Tamiroff continued to sample American T.V. but was still very active in American, French and Italian movies. His voice and talent were still a draw in films like Topkapi (1964) and Alphaville (1965). In addition, he remained on call for Welles' meandering/unfinished Don Quixote (1992) as Sancho Panza for nearly twenty years. One of the great character actors of film history, Akim Tamiroff appeared in over 150 screen projects.- Actor
- Composer
- Additional Crew
Al Jolson was known in the industry as "The World's Greatest Entertainer," for well over 40 years. After his death his influence continued unabated with such performers as Sammy Davis Jr., Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Jackie Wilson and Jerry Lee Lewis all mentioning him as an inspiration.
Al Jolson was born Asa Yoelson in Seredzius, Lithuania, to a Jewish family, the son of Naiomi Etta (Cantor) and Moise Rubin Yoelson, who emigrated alone to Washington, D.C., to establish himself. After four years he sent for his family. Nine months later his wife died (apparently during childbirth), which devastated the eight-year-old Asa. Young Al would soon find his outlet in the theater. Soon he was singing with his older brother, Harry, for senators and soldiers. He entertained the troops that were headed for the Spanish-American War.
Jolson's career in vaudeville started with his brother in New York, but never really got off the ground. Different partners allowed Jolson to experiment, but it was as a solo act in San Francisco that he finally hit it big. He was signed eventually by Lew Dockstaders' Minstrels. It is important to note that, although performing in blackface, Dockstader's was not a minstrel show in the traditional sense of the "Tambo and Bones" variety of the previous century. It was a sophisticated, topical, Broadway-style revue. The myth lingers to this day that Jolson was a minstrel. He most certainly was not.
Jolson's stay in vaudeville was relatively short, as his talent was quickly recognized by the Shubert Brothers, who signed him to appear in the opening show of their new Winter Garden Theater on Broadway in April of 1912. Thus began what many consider to be the greatest career in the history of Broadway. Not a headliner initially, Jolson soon became "King of the Winter Garden," with shows specifically written for him. "Winter Garden" and "Jolson" became synonymous for close to 20 years. During that time Jolson received reviews that have yet to be matched. Audiences shouted, pleaded and often would not allow the show to proceed, such was the power of his presence. At one performance in Boston, the usually staid and conservative Boston audience stopped the show for 45 minutes! He was said to have had an "electric' personality, along with the ability to make each member of the audience believe that he was singing only to them.
In 1927 Jolson starred in the New York-shot The Jazz Singer (1927) and the rest is film history. But just before it was theatrically released, producer, Warner' His appearance in that film, nowadays considered a somewhat creaky, stodgy and primitive museum piece, electrified audiences and caused a sensation. Jolson was bigger than ever and Hollywood came a-calling. However, Jolson on film was a pale version of Jolson on stage. His screen appearances, with some exceptions, are stiff and wooden. Though he continued into the 1930s to star on radio, he was no longer quite the star he had been.
During World War II, Jolson entertained troops in Africa and Sicily but was cut short by a bout of malaria and pneumonia. Always a favorite with audiences, he continued to entertain in the United States when he met his fourth wife, Erle Chenault Galbraith, an x-ray technician.
By the mid-'40s, though. his stardom had faded quite a bit. Columbia Pictures, inspired by the success of Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), decided that a Jolson biography might work as well. In 1946 it released The Jolson Story (1946), with song-and-dance man Larry Parks miming to Jolson's vocals. It was the surprise smash hit of the season and the highest grossing film of the year. Parks received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Jolson was now as big, or bigger, than ever. So successful was the film that Columbia made a sequel, Jolson Sings Again (1949), which remains one of a few biography sequels in film history (Funny Girl/Funny Lady - the story of fellow Winter Garden performer Fannie Brice is another rare example). It was also quite successful at the box office. So big had Jolson's star risen that in 1948, when Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Perry Como were at their peaks, Jolson was voted "The Most Popular Male Vocalist" by a Variety poll.
In 1950, against his doctor's orders, Jolson went to Korea to entertain his favorite audience, American troops. While there his health declined and shortly after his return to the U.S. he suffered a massive heart attack and died.- Feodor Fedorovich Chaliapin Jr. was born October 6, 1905, in Moscow, Russia. He was the youngest of six children. His father was the world-famous Russian Opera basso Feodor Chaliapin Sr.. His mother, Iola Tornagi, was a prima-ballerina who quit the stage after her marriage and became a caring mother of six children. Young Feodor grew up in a trilingual family environment. He received an excellent private education in Moscow, where he enjoyed the company of his father's friends, such as Sergei Rachmaninoff and Konstantin Korovin. After the Russian revolution of 1917, he and his father fled from Russia to Paris, France.
Chaliapin Jr. got out from under his father's shadow after moving from Paris to Hollywood. There he began his film career, playing cameo roles in silent films. He created a niche for himself as an impressive character actor with excellent skills. His role as Kashkin, dying in the arms of Gary Cooper in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), was one of the finest moments in his early career. He played a variety of Russian characters in films made during and after the Second World War. Among the most memorable of his early works was his role as Fomich in Prisoner of the Volga (1959), directed by Viktor Tourjansky, also a Russian emigrant.
After World War 2 Chaliapin moved to Rome, Italy. There he continued his film career as a character actor, from the 1950s-1970s. He played a broad array of very different characters, ranging from a comic gem as Sen. Torsello in the political satire The Eroticist (1972), to a sinister Prof. Arnold in the horror film Inferno (1980). He returned to Hollywood and made a comeback in his later years. He really made his mark by playing the blind, murderous monk "Jorge of Burgos" in The Name of the Rose (1986). He is probably best known for his role as the loony dog-walking grandfather in Moonstruck (1987), living in a world of his own and greeting the Moon with his funny cries "La Luna! La Luna!" He also enjoyed a fine part as Leonides Cox, 'Robert De Niro''s father in Stanley & Iris (1990). His last notable role was as Prof. Bartnev in The Inner Circle (1991), based on a true story about people suffering in the Soviet Russia under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin.
In 1960, during "The Thaw" initiated by Nikita Khrushchev, Chaliapin Jr. saved his mother from the communist captivity and reunited with her in Rome, Italy. At that time, Iola Tornagi was 87 and had been granted permission to leave the Soviet Union. She left behind a magnificent art collection and a museum-quality home, built in Moscow by her famous husband. She could only bring her son an album of pictures of his childhood and youth in pre-communist Russia.
24 years later, Chaliapin Jr. took part in the returning of his famous father's remains from Paris to Moscow in 1984, which was also a result of reforms known as perestroika initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev. Chaliapin was allowed to visit Moscow in 1984 for the burial ceremony of his father, Chialiapin Sr., at the Novodevichy Monastery Cemetery. There he briefly rejoiced with his three sisters and other relatives around his father's tomb.
Through his entire life Feodor Feodorovich Chaliapin Jr. was devoted to his mother, Iola Tornagi. She died in 1964, and was laid to rest in the cemetery of Rome. He died of natural causes on September 17, 1992, at his home in Rome, Italy, and was laid to rest next to his mother in the cemetery of Rome. - Writer
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Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born on November 11, 1821, in Moscow, Russia. He was the second of seven children of Mikhail Andreevich and Maria Dostoevsky. His father, a doctor, was a member of the Russian nobility, owned serfs and had a considerable estate near Moscow where he lived with his family. It's believed that he was murdered by his own serfs in revenge for the violence he would commit against them while in drunken rages. As a child Fyodor was traumatized when he witnessed the rape of a young female serf and suffered from epileptic seizures. He was sent to a boarding school, where he studied sciences, languages and literature. He was devastated when his favorite writer, Alexander Pushkin, was killed in a duel in St. Petersburg in 1837. That same year Dostoevsky's mother died, and he moved to St. Petersburg. There he graduated from the Military Engineering Academy, and served in the Tsar's government for a year.
Dostoevsky was active in St. Petersburg literary life; he grew out of his early influence by Nikolay Gogol, translated "Eugenia Grande" by Honoré de Balzac in 1844 and published his own first novel, "Poor Folk", in 1845, and became friends with Ivan Turgenev and Nikolai A. Nekrasov, but it ended abruptly after they criticized his writing. At that time he became indirectly involved in a revolutionary movement, for which he was arrested in 1849, convicted of treason and sentenced to death. His execution was scheduled for a freezing winter day in St. Petersburg, and at the appointed hour he was blindfolded and ordered to stand before the firing squad, waiting to be shot. The execution was called off at the last minute, however, and his sentence was commuted to a prison term and exile in Siberia, where his health declined amid increased epileptic seizures. After serving ten years in prison and exile, he regained his title in the nobility and returned to St. Petersburg with permission from the Tsar. He abandoned his formerly liberal views and became increasingly conservative and religious. That, however, didn't stop him from developing an acute gambling problem, and he accumulated massive gambling debts.
In 1862, after returning from his first major tour of Western Europe, Dostoevsky wrote that "Russia needs to be reformed, by learning the new ideas that are developing in Europe." On his next trip to Europe, in 1863, he spent all of his money on a manipulative woman, A. Suslova, went on a losing gambling spree, returned home flat broke and sank into a depression. At that time he wrote "Notes from Underground" (1864), preceding existentialism in literature. His first wife died in 1864, after six years of a childless marriage, and he adopted her son from her previous marriage. Painful experiences caused him to fall further into depression, but it was during this period that he wrote what many consider his finest work: "Crime and Punishment" (1866).
After completion of "The Gambler" (1867), the 47-year-old Dostoevsky married his loyal friend and literary secretary, 20-year-old Anna Snitkina, and they had four children. His first baby died at three months of age, causing him to sink further into depression and triggering more epileptic seizures. At that time Dostoevsky expressed his disillusionment with the Utopian ideas in his novels "The Idiot" (1868) and "The Devils" (aka "The Possessed") (1871), where the "devils" are destructive people, such as revolutionaries and terrorists. Dostoevsky was the main speaker at the opening of the monument to Alexander Pushkin in 1880, calling Pushkin a "wandering Russian, searching for universal happiness". In his final great novel, "The Brothers Karamazov" (1880), Dostoevsky revealed the components of his own split personality, depicted in four main characters; humble monk Alyosha, compulsive gambler Dmitri, rebellious intellectual Ivan, and their cynical father Fyodor Karamazov.
Dostoevsky died on February 9, 1881, of a lung hemorrhage caused by emphysema and epileptic seizures. He lived his entire life under the pall of epilepsy, much like the mythical "Sword of Damocles", and was fearless in telling the truth. His writings are an uncanny reflection on his own life - the fate of a genius in Russia.- Actress
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Olga Chekhova (also Olga Tschechova in German), one of the most popular stars of the silent film era, remained a mysterious person throughout her life and was accused of being a Russian agent in Nazi Germany.
She was born Olga Konstantinovna von Knipper on April 26, 1897, in Aleksandropol, Transcaucasia, Russian Empire (now Gyumri, Armenia). She was the second of 3 children in a bilingual Russian-German family. Her father, Konstantin Leonardovich Knipper, a Lutheran of German descent. He made a military career in Russia as a railroad engineer. Young Olga studied art and literature at an art school in St. Petersburg. Later as an immigrant in Germany she claimed friendship with the family of Tsar Nicholas II--who also was of German origin--and that she had encountered the notorious Russian mystic and monk, Grigory Rasputin. In reality, she was sent from St. Petersburg to Moscow to her aunt, actress Olga Knipper-Chekhova, to study acting at Moscow Art Theatre. In 1914, at age 17, she eloped with Russian-Jewish actor Michael Chekhov, nephew of Anton Chekhov.
Olga adored her husband, Michael Chekhov, a rising star of stage and film. But he met another beauty, Xenia Zimmer, and became involved in extramarital affair while Olga was pregnant with their child. Their daughter, Ada Tschechowa, was born in 1916. Olga separated from Michael Chekhov during the tragic time of the Russian Revolution in 1917. That same year she made her film debut in a Russian silent film, Anya Kraeva (1918).
Olga claimed that she fled Russia disguised as a peasant woman and posed as a mute while carrying a diamond ring in her mouth. In reality she married an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, Friedrich Jaroshi, and took a train from the Moscow Belorussky station to Vienna, Austria, having travel documents from the Russian Commissar of Culture (and she was also helped by the Russian intelligence agency in exchange for her cooperation). She was later invited to the Soviet Embassy in Berlin for meetings with Soviet officials. In Germany she was introduced to film producer Erich Pommer and renowned director F.W. Murnau, who gave her a leading role in his film, The Haunted Castle (1921). She quickly became a huge star in Europe and played in more than 40 silent films during the decade. Olga was joined by ex-husband Michael Chekhov in several films, including Der Narr seiner Liebe (1929) (aka "The Fool of Love"), which she also directed.
Future Nazi leader Adolf Hitler reportedly fell for Olga upon seeing her cold and beautiful face in several films in the 1920s. She was famous for her movie image as a baroness and was courted in the 1930s by Luftwaffe boss Hermann Göring and by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Some wives of high-ranking Nazi officials were jealous of and hated the beautiful Olga. Goebbels was known to have visited her home on several occasions when he wanted to be away from his Nazi "activities". He invited Olga to several Nazi receptions and introduced her to Adolf Hitler in April 1933. Olga became a personal friend of Hitler and was photographed sitting next to "Der Fuhrer" at official events of the Nazi Party. She also received valuable Christmas gifts from Hitler, and regular birthday presents and other tokens of his attention.
In 1936 Olga was honored with the title of "State Actress" of the Third Reich and was made a German citizen. She married a wealthy Belgian businessman, Marcel Robyns. One day prior to the wedding she had a private reception with Hitler, who gave her permission to retain her German citizenship. Two years later she divorced Robyns and returned to her high-society life in Berlin. Her famous 1939 photo-op with Hitler was thoroughly analyzed in Moscow.
She was invited by Soviet officials to join Hermann Göring and Joachim von Ribbentrop at the meeting with Vyacheslav Molotov and Gen. V. N. Merkulov at the Soviet Embassy in Berlin in 1940. At that time Olga was associated with her agent-brother Lev Knipper, who was sent from Moscow to Germany on a secret mission to assassinate Adolf Hitler. The plan was to use one of Olga's visits with Hitler for a suicide attack on the Fuhrer. Olga was kept oblivious of the plan, which was aborted by an order from Joseph Stalin, who became paranoid about the possibility of Germany's alliance with Britain if Hitler was killed. Interestingly, Stalin and Hitler were both amateur film directors in the 1920s, but as dictators they now directed the course of history.
Olga was invited by Josef Goebbels to the official reception in Berlin in July of 1941, only a month after the Nazis invaded Russia and Luftwaffe bombings caused massive devastation to Russian cities. Goebbels announced the planned occupation of Moscow.
She was being investigated by the SS on orders from SS leader Heinrich Himmler. She was constantly under surveillance by both Nazi and Soviet agents in her Berlin home. As the war progressed and conditions got progressively worse for the Nazi regime, party bosses became increasingly paranoid. Himmler was planning to arrest her in January of 1945. One early morning she was informed of Himmler's move. She immediately called him directly with a request for a favor--to let her finish her morning cup of coffee comfortably. When SS commandos surrounded her home Himmler opened her door and was met by an angry Adolf Hitler, who in no uncertain terms informed Himmler that he had made a mistake.
Olga was a beautiful pawn in a dangerous game between the two most destructive powers in the Second World War. She survived through acting, cheating, lying and disguise. She protected her daughter Ada from Nazi anti-Semitism by hiding the fact that her ex-husband, Michael Chekhov, was Jewish. Her brother Lev Knipper was held in a Nazi concentration camp and managed to survive because of his perfect German (and probably with her help). During the savage battle for Berlin just before the war's end, Olga hid in a bomb shelter and was eventually taken prisoner by the Red Army. She was flown to Moscow in April of 1945, for debriefing at the offices of Soviet secret police officials Viktor Abakumov and Lavrenti Beria. She discreetly attended the Moscow Art Theatre performance of "The Cherry Orchard" starring her aunt Olga Knipper-Chekhova in May of 1945. They were not allowed to talk and her aunt Olga fainted backstage.
After two months of interrogations in Moscow, on June 26, 1945, Olga was flown back to Berlin, where she was assisted by the Soviet Army. She was given money and moved in to a Soviet-supervised house on Spree Strasse in the Soviet sector of East Berlin. Several articles in the French and British presses stated that she was a clandestine agent and secretly decorated by the Soviet government. She praised the Russian victory over the Nazis in a private letter to her aunt Olga Knipper-Chekhova. Meanwhile, the film she made in Hollywood turned out to be a flop in the US market, mainly because of her heavy Russian accent.
She continued a film career in Europe and ran her own film production company, Venus-Film Olga Tschechowa. In 1950 she moved to Munich and starred in several films. In 1955 she used her star power to launch a successful cosmetics company, "Olga Tscheschowa Kosmetik Geselschaft." Her remarkable acting career, spanning almost 60 years, ended in 1978, with a small film role as a grandmother.
Her personal file was temporarily available for viewing at the KGB archives in Moscow. One report on her was prepared and signed by the notoriously brutal KGB chief Viktor S. Abakumov. On that report a handwritten question was left by a reader in Kremlin: "What do you suggest to be done with Ms. Chekhova?", the handwriting was by Joseph Stalin. Stalin was quoted as having said, "The actress Olga Chekhova will be very useful in the post-war years", and she probably was. One of her films was titled Der Mann, der zweimal leben wollte (1950), or "The Man Who Wanted to Live Two Lives"--and that was exactly what she did.
In 1955, Olga was saddened by the death of Michael Chekhov. In 1966, Olga suffered from another tragedy: her only daughter Ada died in an airplane crash. Devastated by the painful loss, Olga suffered from bouts of depression and turned to alcohol, but she survived thanks to her strong will and lust for life. She lived for another fifteen years, played a few more roles in the movies, and saw her great-grandchildren grow. Moments before she died, sensing the end was near, she ordered a glass of champagne from her granddaughter Vera Tschechowa. That was March 9, 1980, in Munich, Germany.
Her last words were, "Life is beautiful!"- Actor
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Familiar character actor of Russian heritage who played in scores of films, mostly in the U.S. He studied at the University of Moscow but left there to attend the Moscow Academy of Dramatic Art. He joined the world- renowned Moscow Art Theatre, where he worked for the next decade as an actor and assistant director, eventually directing plays himself. In 1923, he emigrated to Berlin and spent most of the next decade acting in films there and in Austria. With the coming of the Nazis, he relocated first to Paris, in 1932, and then to the United States in 1937. He immediately found himself very busy with dozens of roles in many popular American films, ranging from Russian to Chinese, Mexican, and Italian characters. Although his specialty was gentle, beatific characters, he could and did on occasion play less noble types. Among his most memorable characterizations were Anselmo, the gentle rebel in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), and the wise peasant in The Magnificent Seven (1960). He died in West Hollywood, California in 1962.- Director
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Lewis Milestone, a clothing manufacturer's son, was born in Bessarabia (now Moldova), raised in Odessa (Ukraine) and educated in Belgium and Berlin (where he studied engineering). He was fluent in both German and Russian and an avid reader. Milestone had an affinity for the theatre from an early age, starting as a prop man and background artist before traveling to the US in 1914 with $6.00 in his pocket. After a succession of odd jobs (including as a dishwasher and a photographer's assistant) he joined the Army Signal Corps in 1917 to make educational short films for U.S. troops. Following World War I, having acquired American citizenship, he went on to Hollywood to meet the director William A. Seiter at Ince Studios. Seiter started him off as an assistant cutter. Milestone quickly worked his way up the ranks to become editor, assistant director and screenwriter on many of Seiter's projects in the early 1920s, experiences that would greatly influence his directing style in years to come.
Milestone directed his first film, Seven Sinners (1925), for Howard Hughes and two years later won his first of two Academy Awards for the comedy Two Arabian Knights (1927). He received his second Oscar for what most regard as his finest achievement, the anti-war movie All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque. The film, universally praised by reviewers for its eloquence and integrity, also won the Best Picture Academy Award that year. A noted Milestone innovation was the use of cameras mounted on wooden tracks, giving his films a more realistic and fluid, rather than static, look. Other trademarks associated with his pictures were taut editing, snappy dialogue and clever visual touches, good examples being the screwball comedy The Front Page (1931), the melodrama Rain (1932)--based on a play by W. Somerset Maugham--and an adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1939). When asked in 1979 about the secret behind his success, he simply declared "Arrogance, chutzpah--in the old Hollywood at least that's the thing that gave everybody pause" (New York Times, September 27, 1980). Milestone had a history of being "difficult", having clashed with Howard Hughes, Warner Brothers and a host of studio executives over various contractual and artistic issues. Nonetheless, he remained constantly employed and worked for most of the major studios at one time or another, though never on long-term contracts. While he was not required to testify before HUAC, Milestone was blacklisted for a year in 1949 because of left-wing affiliations dating back to the 1930's. His output became less consistent during the 1950s and his career finished on a low with the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) and its incongruously cast, equally headstrong star Marlon Brando.
Milestone must be credited with a quirky sense of humor: when the producer of "All Quiet on the Western Front", Carl Laemmle Jr., demanded a "happy ending" for the picture, Milestone telephoned, "I've got your happy ending. We'll let the Germans win the war".
Having suffered a stroke, Lewis Milestone spent the last ten years of his life confined to a wheelchair. He died September 25, 1980, at the University of California Medical Center in Los Angeles.- Actor
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Mischa Auer, the American screen's supreme exponent of the "Mad Russian" stereotype so dear to Yankee hearts before and after World War II, was born Mischa Ounskowsky on November 17, 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia, the grandson of violinist Leopold Auer, whose surname he took when he became a professional actor in the U.S. during the 1920s. Mischa's father, an officer in the Imperial Russian Navy, died in the Russo-Japanese War while was he was still a baby, which wiped the family out financially. After the November 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Ounskowsky family disintegrated and Mischa became a "street Arab", living with homeless youths and barely scraping by in appalling poverty. He eventually was reunited with his mother, who had nursing experience and became a caregiver in the nascent Soviet Union. But Vladimir Lenin's socialist dream wasn't for her, and she fled to Turkey with Mischa.
In Constantinople Mischa's mother contracted typhus from the patients she was tending and died. The young boy had to dig a grave with his own hands to bury her. He then began wandering, and was in Italy when Leopold Auer, his mother's father, discovered his whereabouts. Subsequently, young Ounskowsky emigrated to the United States to join Auer, who lived in New York.
Leopold encouraged his grandson to become a musician, and Mischa matriculated at New York City's Ethical Culture School to please his grandfather. He became an accomplished musician, able to play multiple instruments, including the violin and piano. However, young Mischa soon became smitten with acting and, through his grandfather's contacts, was able to turn professional in the 1920s. Mischa Auer made his Broadway debut on February 24, 1925, in a walk-on role as an elderly guest in the Actors Theatre production of Henrik Ibsen's "The Wild Duck", which starred Helen Chandler as Hedvig. He also appeared in the Actors Theatre's Broadway production of the play "Morals" in 1925 before continuing his his apprenticeship in small roles, including an appearance with the great Walter Hampden in "Cyrano de Bergerac".
While acting, Mischa also performed as a musician. As an actor, he eventually caught on with Eva Le Gallienne's touring theatrical company before joining Bertha Kalich's company, which toured the provinces after Kalich -- a stalwart of the Yiddish theater -- made her last appearance as the eponymous "Magda" on Broadway in January and February 1926. Kalich cast Auer as Max in the touring production of "Magda".
Director Frank Tuttle hired Auer for a role in the comedy Something Always Happens (1928) after he saw the Russian perform with the Bertha Kalich Company in Los Angeles. This led to a decade of screen work in many films, in which the tall, unusual-looking actor was typecast as a foreigner, often of a villainous bent as befitted the prejudices of the time, which were actively catered to by the movies. The films he appeared in, usually in small, uncredited parts, included Rasputin and the Empress (1932) with John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore and Ethel Barrymore; Viva Villa! (1934) with superstar Wallace Beery; and The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), one of Gary Cooper's best early films.
One year after signing a long-term contract with Universal, Auer broke through into the realm of featured character actors with his Academy Award-nominated turn as the fake nobleman/freeloader/gigolo Carlo in the classic screwball comedy My Man Godfrey (1936) over at Universal in 1936. That was the first year that Oscars were awarded to supporting players, and although he lost to eventual three-time Best Supporting Actor Academy Award winner Walter Brennan, it made him as a popular character actor. Auer -- the Mad Russian -- became a fixture in comedies of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Of the role of Carlo, he said: "That one role made a comedian out of me. I haven't been anything else since. It's paid off very well. Do you wonder that I am flattered when people say I am mad?"
He turned in a memorable appearance as the Russian ballet-master Boris Kolenkhov in Frank Capra's Oscar-winning classic You Can't Take It with You (1938) opposite Jean Arthur and Ann Miller. Other memorable parts in the "Golden Years of Hollywood" phase of his career came in the musical One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937) in support of Deanna Durbin and as Boris Callahan, who touches off a cantina catfight between Marlene Dietrich and Una Merkel, in the classic Destry Rides Again (1939).
After appearing in the musical comedy "The Lady Comes Across" in early 1942, a flop which lasted three performances, he toured with vaudeville before acting in the summer radio series "Mischa the Magnificent". In the radio show, he played a man writing his memoirs, but after the summer run he returned to the movies. The last play he appeared in on Broadway, "Lovely Me", opened on Christmas Day 1946 and closed 37 performances later, on January 25, 1947. Between movies, he appeared in touring shows and in vaudeville.
During the 1950s, after the Paramount decision, when Hollywood first experienced runaway production as American producers turned to the cheaper European film studios to save money, Auer decamped for Europe. He and his family settled in Salzburg, Austria, where he made broadcasts for Radio Free Europe between appearances in European-made films, mostly in France. He achieved acclaim in Paris for his appearance in the title role of the 1953 revival of the comedy "Tovarich".
On the Continent he was typecast as an elderly eccentric, most notably in Orson Welles's Confidential Report (1955). He also appeared frequently on American television during the 1950s. He was praised for his appearance in a 1953 Omnibus (1952) presentation of George Bernard Shaw's play "Arms and the Man". He suffered a heart attack in 1957 but continued to make movies in Europe and appear on television in the U.S.
In 1964 he appeared as Baron Popoff in the New York Lincoln Center Music Theater's revival of "The Merry Widow". It was not a success, but the New York Times review praised him: "Mischa Auer is, after all, one of the great comics. With his head down a little, jowls flapping, his ripe Marsovian accent rolling through the house, his eyes popping--he dominates the performance."
Suffering from cardiovascular disease, Auer suffered a second heart attack and died in Rome on March 5, 1967, at the age of 61. He will long be remembered as one of the inimitable character actors who graced the classic films of the Golden Age of Hollywood.- Director
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Mikhail Kalatozov was born on 28 December 1903 in Tiflis, Russian Empire [now Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia]. He was a director and cinematographer, known for The Cranes Are Flying (1957), True Friends (1954) and Zagovor obrechyonnykh (1950). He died on 27 March 1973 in Moscow, RSFSR, USSR [now Russia].- Additional Crew
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Mayer was born Lazar Meir in the Ukraine and grew up in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada after his parents fled Russian oppression in 1886. He had a brutal childhood, raised in poverty and suffering physical and emotional abuse from his nearly-illiterate peddler father. In the early 1890s, he changed his name to Louis and fudged his birth date to reflect the more "patriotic" date of July 4, 1885. He moved to Boston in 1904 and struggled as a scrap-metal dealer until he was able to purchase a burlesque house. Although he made large sums by showing films (he made a sizable fortune off The Birth of a Nation (1915)), his early business ventures favored legitimate theater in New England. As his theater empire expanded, he had acquired and refurbished enough small movie theaters that he was able to move his business to Los Angeles and venture into movie production in 1918. Along with Samuel Goldwyn and Marcus Loew of Metro Pictures, he formed a new company called Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).
Over the next 25 years, MGM was "the Tiffany of the studios," producing more films and movie stars than any other studio in the world. Mayer became the prime creator of the enduring Hollywood of myth, home to stars like Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, and Jean Harlow. Mayer became the highest-paid man in America, one of the country's most successful horse breeders, a political force and Hollywood's leading spokesman. Both he and MGM reached their peaks at the end of World War II, and Mayer was forced out in 1951. He died of leukemia in 1957.- Actor
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Producer, director and actor Gregory Ratoff was born in Samara, Russia on April 20, 1897, and studied at the University of St. Petersburg. His pursuit of a law career was interrupted by service in the Czar's army, and he fought in World War I. He later changed his focus and went on to make a name for himself with the Moscow Art Theatre. Fleeing his homeland during the Bolshevik revolution, he resettled in France. While performing in the Paris production of "Russe Revue" in 1922, impresario Lee Shubert brought Ratoff and the show to Broadway and the actor decided to stay. Also in this revue was Russian actress Eugenie Leontovich; the couple married a year later. Ratoff joined the Yiddish Players in addition to appearing in Shubert's productions and became known as a theatrical impresario himself, performing in all three capacities (producing, directing, acting). He made his Hollywood debut as an actor in 1932, and his heavy accent, mangling of the English language and hefty Laughtonesque features had him typecast as an eccentric, harried and/or villainous foreigner. He played Mae West's attorney in I'm No Angel (1933), a baron in Alice Faye's Sally, Irene and Mary (1938) and added to the fun in John Barrymore's self-parodying The Great Profile (1940). As a film director he stood out among his peers with such classics as Intermezzo (1939), the tearjerker with Ingrid Bergman and Leslie Howard that introduced Bergman to American audiences, and the robust swashbuckler The Corsican Brothers (1941). Most of Ratoff's appearances were in "B" fare in both leads and supporting roles. Ironically, he was often called upon to simply play himself -- namely, an excitable, whirlwind producer or director, prime examples of which are his MGM-like producer Julius Saxe in What Price Hollywood? (1932) and the nervous, mop-faced Broadway producer Max Fabian who tangles with Bette Davis' stage diva Margo Channing in All About Eve (1950). One English comedy, Abdullah's Harem (1955), which he produced, directed and starred in as a Middle Eastern monarch, was a dismal failure. Divorced from Leonovitch in 1949, Ratoff died of leukemia in 1960, the same year he appeared in the epic film Exodus (1960), and he directed the well-received biopic Oscar Wilde (1960) starring Robert Morley.- Producer
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Famed for his relentless ambition, bad temper and genius for publicity, Samuel Goldwyn became Hollywood's leading "independent" producer -- largely because none of his partners could tolerate him for long. Born Shmuel (or Schmuel) Gelbfisz, probably in 1879, in the Jewish section of Warsaw, he was the eldest of six children of a struggling used-furniture dealer. In 1895 he made his way to England, where relatives Anglicized his name to Samuel Goldfish. There he begged (or stole) enough money for a ticket in steerage across the Atlantic. He reached the US, probably via Canada, in 1898. He gravitated to Gloversville, New York, in the Adirondack foothills, which was then the capital of the US leather glove industry; he became one of the country's most successful glove salesmen. After moving his base of operations to Manhattan and marrying the sister of Jesse L. Lasky, who was then a theatrical producer, Goldfish convinced Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille to go into film production. The new company's first film, The Squaw Man (1914), was one of the first features made in Hollywood; the company later became the nucleus of what would later become Paramount Pictures. As his marriage fell apart, Goldfish dissolved his partnership with Lasky. His next enterprise was the Goldwyn Co., founded in 1916 and named for himself and his partners, brothers Edgar Selwyn and Archibald Selwyn--Goldfish liked the name so much he took it for his own. The Goldwyn Co.'s stars included Mabel Normand, Madge Kennedy and Will Rogers, but its most famous legacy was its "Leo the Lion" trademark, which was adopted by its successor company, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Goldwyn himself was ousted from his own company before the merger, which was why his name became part of MGM even though he himself had nothing to do with the company. After his firing Goldwyn would have nothing to do with partners and went into independent production on his own, and for 35 years was the boss and sole proprietor of his own production company, a mini-studio specializing in expensive "quality" films, distributed initially by United Artists and later by RKO. His contract actors at various times included Vilma Bánky, Ronald Colman, Eddie Cantor, Gary Cooper, David Niven and Danny Kaye. In some cases, Goldwyn collected substantial fees for "lending" his stars to other producers. Touted by publicists for his "Goldwyn touch" and loathed by many of his hirelings for his habit of ordering films recast, rewritten and recut, Goldwyn is best remembered for his films that teamed director William Wyler and cinematographer Gregg Toland.- Writer
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Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828, in his ancestral estate Yasnaya Polyana, South of Moscow, Russia. He was the fourth of five children in a wealthy family of Russian landed Gentry. His parents died when he was a child, and he was brought up by his elder brothers and relatives.
Leo Tolstoy studied languages and law at Kazan University for three years. He was dissatisfied with the school and left Kazan without a degree, returned to his estate and educated himself independently. In 1848 he moved to the capital, St. Petersburg, and there passed two tests for a law degree. He was abruptly called to return to his estate near Moscow, where he inherited 4000 acres of land and 350 serfs. There Tolstoy built a school for his serfs, and acted as a teacher. He briefly went to a Medical School in Moscow, but lost a fortune in gambling, and was pulled out by his brother. He took military training, became an Army officer, and moved to the Caucasus, where he lived a simple life for three years with Cossacs. There he wrote his first novel - "Childhood" (1852), it became a success. With writing "Boyhood" (1854) and "Youth" (1857) he concluded the autobiographical trilogy. In the Crimean War (1854-55) Tolstoy served as artillery commander in the Battle of Sevastopol, and was decorated for his courage. Between the battles he wrote three stories titled "Sevastopol Sketches", that won him wide attention, and a complement from the Czar Aleksandr II.
After the war, Tolstoy returned to St. Petersburg, where he enjoyed the friendship of Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai A. Nekrasov, Ivan Goncharov, and other writers. On his trips to Europe, he had discussions with Gertsen in London, and attended Darwin's lectures. In Brussels he had meetings with philosophers Prudhon and Lelewel. Tolstoy undertook a research of schools in Europe, and later he built and organized over 20 schools for poor people in Russia. At that time the secret police began surveillance, and searched his home. In 1862 he married Sofia Andreevna Bers, and fathered 13 children with his wife. Four of their babies died, and the couple raised the remaining nine children. His wife was also his literary secretary, and also contributed to his best works, "War and Peace" (1863-69) and "Anna Karenina" (1873-77). In his "Confession" (1879) Tolstoy revealed his own version of Christianity, blended with socialism, that won him many followers. Tolstoyan communities sprang up in America and Europe, and he assisted the Russian non-Orthodox Christians (Dukhobors) in migrating to USA and Canada. He split from aristocratic class and developed an ascetic lifestyle, becoming a vegetarian, and a farmer. He sponsored and organized free meals for the poor. He transfered his copyright on all of his writings after 1880 to public domain. In his later age Tolstoy was pursuing the path of a wandering ascetic. He corresponded with Mohandas K. Gandhi, who was directly influenced by Tolstoy's "The Kingdom of God is Within You" (1894), which was praised by many nonviolent movements.
In 1900 Tolstoy criticized the Tsar's government in a series of publications, calling for separation of Chuch and State. Tsar Nicholas II retaliated through the Church, by expulsion of Tolstoy from Orthodox Cristianity as a "heretic". He fell ill, and suffered from a severe depression; he was suicidal and even had to eliminate all hunting guns from his home, because of his suicidal mode. He was treated by the famous doctor Dahl, and was visited by composer Sergei Rachmaninoff and basso Feodor Chaliapin Sr., who performed for Tolstoy on many occasions. Later he went to convalesce in Yalta, in Crimea, where he spent time with Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. Tolstoy was an obvious candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but was initially omitted by the Nobel Committee for his views. The omission caused a strong response from a group of Swedish writers and artists. They sent an address to Tolstoy, but the writer answered by declining any future prize nomination.
In 1902 Tolstoy wrote a letter to the Tsar, calling for social justice, to prevent a civil war, and in 1904, during the Russo-Japanese War, Tolstoy wrote a condemnation of war. The Tsar replied by increasing police surveillance on Tolstoy. In November of 1910 he left his estate, probably taking the path of a wandering ascetic, which he had been pursuing for decades. He left home without explanations and took a train, in which he caught pneumonia, and died at a remote station of Astapovo. He was laid to rest in his estate of Yasnaya Polyana, which was made a Tolstoy National Museum.
His youngest daughter, named Alexandra Tolstoy, was the director of the Tolstoy Museum, and was arrested by the Communists five times. She emigrated from Russia to the United States, where she founded the Tolstoy Foundation. She helped many prominent Russian intellectuals, such as Vladimir Nabokov and Sergei Rachmaninoff among many others.- Actor
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John Bleifer was born on 26 July 1901 in Zawiercie, Poland, Russian Empire [now Zawiercie, Slaskie, Poland]. He was an actor, known for Les Misérables (1935), Red Snow (1952) and Pacific Liner (1939). He was married to Grace Klestick. He died on 24 January 1992 in Los Angeles County, California, USA.- Music Department
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Dimitri Tiomkin was a Russian Jewish composer who emigrated to America and became one of the most distinguished and best-loved music writers of Hollywood. He won a hallowed place in the pantheon of the most successful and productive composers in American film history, earning himself four Oscars and sixteen Academy Awards nominations. He was born Dimitri Zinovievich Tiomkin on May 10, 1894, in Kremenchug, Russia. His mother, Marie (nee Tartakovsky), was a Russian pianist and teacher. His father, Zinovi Tiomkin, was a renowned medical doctor. His uncle, rabbi Vladimir Tiomkin, was the first President of the World Zionist Union. Young Dimitri began his music studies under the tutelage of his mother. Then, at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, he studied piano under Felix Blumenfeld and Isabelle Vengerova. He also studied composition under the conservatory's director, Aleksandr Glazunov, who appreciated Tiomkin's talent and hired him as a piano tutor for his niece. Soon Dimitri appeared on Russian stages as a child pianist prodigy and continued to develop into a virtuoso pianist. Like other intellectuals in St. Petersburg, Tiomkin frequented the club near the Opera, called Stray Dog Café, where Russian celebrities, including directors Vsevolod Meyerhold and Nicolas Evreinoff, writers Boris Pasternak, Aleksei Tolstoy, Sergei Esenin, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilev and Vladimir Mayakovsky, had their bohemian hangout. There Tiomlkin could be seen with his two friends, composer Sergei Prokofiev and choreographer Mikhail Fokin. At that time he also gained exposure and a keen interest in American music, including the works of Irving Berlin, ragtime, blues, and early jazz. Tiomkin started his music career as a piano accompanist for Russian and French silent films in movie houses of St. Petersburg. When the famous comedian Max Linder toured in Russia, he hired Tiomkin to play piano improvisations for the Max Linder Show, and their collaboration was successful. He also provided classical piano accompaniment for the famous ballerina Tamara Karsavina. However, the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia caused dramatic political and economic changes. From 1917 to 1921 Tiomkin was a Red Army staff composer, writing scores for revolutionary mass spectacles at the Palace Square involving 500 musicians and 8000 extras, such as "The Storming of the Winter Palace" staged by Vsevolod Meyerhold and Nikolai Yevreinov for the third anniversary of the Communist Revolution. In 1921 Tiomkin emigrated from Russia and moved to Berlin to join his father, who was working with the famous German biochemist Paul Ehrlich. In Berlin Tiomkin had several study sessions with Ferruccio Busoni and his circle. By 1922 Dimitri was well known for his concert appearances in Germany, often with the Berlin Philharmonic. Among his repertoire were pieces written for him by other composers. He also concertized in France. There, in Paris, Feodor Chaliapin Sr. convinced Tiomkin to emigrate to the United States. In 1925 Tiomkin got his first gig in New York: he became the main pianist for a Broadway dance studio. There he met and soon married the principal dancer/choreographer, Albertina Rasch. He also met composers George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Jerome Kern. In 1928 Tiomkin made a concert tour of Europe, introducing the works of Gershwin to audiences there. He gave the French premiere of Gershwin's "Piano Concerto in F" at the famed "L'Opera de Paris." His Hollywood debut came in 1929, when MGM offered him a contract to score music for five films. His wife got a position as an assistant choreographer for some musical films. He also scored a Universal Pictures film, performed concerts in New York City and continued composing ballet music for his wife's dance work. He also continued writing American popular music and songs. He received further Broadway exposure with the Shuberts and Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.. He produced his own play "Keeping Expenses Down," but it was a flop amidst the gloom of the Big Depression, and he once again returned to Hollywood in 1933. When he came back he was on his own. By that time Tiomkin was disillusioned with the intrigue and politics inside the Hollywood studio system. He already knew the true value of his musical talent, and chose to freelance with the studios rather than accepting a multi-picture contract. He became something of a crusader, pushing for better pay and residuals. His independent personality was reflected in his music and business life: he was never under a long-term studio contract. Though MGM was the first to be acquainted with his services, Tiomkin next turned to Paramount for Alice in Wonderland (1933), another fine example of making music that he liked. Hollywood's most prominent independent composer, Tiomkin, thanks to his free-agent status, negotiated contractual terms to his benefit, which in turn benefited other musicians. He aggressively sought music publishing rights and formed his own ASCAP music publishing company, Volta Music Corporation, while remaining faithful to France-based performing rights organization SACEM. In Tiomkin's own words: "My fight is for dignity. Not only for composer, but for all artists responsible for picture." He also fought for employing qualified musicians regardless of their race. As a composer classically trained at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Tiomkin was highly skilled in orchestral arrangements with complex brass and strings, but he was also thoroughly versed in the musical subtleties of America and integrated it into traditional European forms. His interest in the musical form resulted in his next score, for the operetta Naughty Marietta (1935), a popular musical that teamed Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. He also did his fair share of stock music arranging. Among his most successful partnerships was that with director Frank Capra, starting with Lost Horizon (1937), where Tiomkin used many innovative ideas, and received his first Academy Award nomination. The association with Capra lasted through four more famous films, culminating with It's a Wonderful Life (1946). In 1937 Tiomkin became a naturalized American citizen. The next year he made his public conducting debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. During the WWII years he wrote music for 12 military documentaries, earning himself a special decoration from the US Department of Defense. After the war he ventured into all styles of music for movies, ranging from mystery and horror to adventure and drama, such as his enchanting score, intricately worked around Claude Debussy's "Girl with the Flaxen Hair," for the haunting Portrait of Jennie (1948) and the energetic martial themes for Cyrano de Bergerac (1950). He scored three films for Alfred Hitchcock, perhaps the most inventive being for the tension-building Strangers on a Train (1951) with its out-of-control carousel finale. He also worked with top directors in that exclusively American genre: the western. His loudest success was the original music for Duel in the Sun (1946) by King Vidor. For that film, Tiomkin wrote a lush orchestral score, trying to fulfill writer/producer David O. Selznick's request to "Make a theme for orgasm!" Tiomkin worked for several weeks, and composed a powerful theme culminating with 40 drummers. Selsnick was impressed, but commented: "This is not orgasm!" Tiomkin worked for one more month and delivered an even more powerful theme culminating with 100 voices. Selznick was impressed again, but commented: "This is not orgasm! This is not the way I f..k!" Tiomkin replied brilliantly, "Mister Selznick, you may f..k the way you want, but this is the way I f..k!" Selznick was convinced, and after that Tiomkin's music was fully accepted. In 1948 he wrote the score for one of the westerns with John Wayne, Red River (1948) by Howard Hawks. Wayne had Tiomkin's touch on five more movies into the 1960s. Tiomkin was adding a song to all of his scores, starting with the obscure Trail to Mexico (1946). The result was successful, and the western score with songs became Tiomkin's signature. Horns and lush string orchestral sound are most associated with Tiomkin's style, which culminated in The Unforgiven (1960) by John Huston, although he used the same approach in High Noon (1952) with the famous song "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'" and Howard Hawks' The Big Sky (1952). Most of his big-screen songs were written for westerns and totaled some 25 themes. The most songs he composed for one movie was six for Friendly Persuasion (1956). Tiomkin achieved dramatic effects by using his signature orchestral arrangements in such famous films as Giant (1956), The Old Man and the Sea (1958) and The Guns of Navarone (1961). He also wrote music and theme songs for several TV series, most notably for Clint Eastwood's Rawhide (1959). In 1967 his beloved wife, Albertina Rasch, passed away, and Tiomkin was emotionally devastated. Going back from his wife's funeral to his Hancock Park home in Los Angeles, he was attacked and beaten by a street gang. The crime caused him more pain, so upon recommendation of his doctor, Tiomkin moved to Europe for the rest of his life. In the 1960s Tiomkin produced Mackenna's Gold (1969) starring Gregory Peck and Omar Sharif. He also executive-produced and orchestrated the US/Russian co-production Tchaikovsky (1970), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for best music, and the movie was also nominated in the foreign language film category. Filming on locations in Russia allowed him to return to his homeland for the first time since 1921, which also was the last visit to his mother country. In 1972 Tiomkin married Olivia Cynthia Patch, a British aristocrat, and the couple settled in London. They also maintained a second home in Paris. For the rest of his life Tiomkin indulged himself in playing piano, a joy also shared by his wife. He died on November 11, 1979, in London, England, and was laid to rest in Forest Lawn Memorial Cemetery in Glendale, California. In 1999 Dimitri Tiomkin was pictured on one of six 33¢ USA commemorative postage stamps in the Legends of American Music series, honoring Hollywood Composers. His music remains popular, and is continuously used in many new films, such as Inglourious Basterds (2009) by director Quentin Tarantino.- Director
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The distinguished film director Anatole Litvak was born in the Ukrainian city of Kiev, the son of Jewish parents. His very first job was as a stage hand. In 1915, he became an actor, performing at a little-known experimental theater in St. Petersburg, Russia. As a teenager, he witnessed the 1917 Russian Revolution and the consequent nationalization of all theaters and drama schools. It was at this time Litvak decided to quit the stage and join the burgeoning Soviet film industry. He was given a job at the Leningrad Nordkino studio as a set designer, but, before long, he worked his way up to directing short features, notably Tatiana (1925), a film about children.
In 1925, he left the Soviet Union for Berlin and was hired by the renowned director Georg Wilhelm Pabst to edit The Joyless Street (1925) starring Greta Garbo. He then began directing numerous short films for Ufa, and, eventually, moved on to full-length features. The most important of these was the romantic comedy Dolly macht Karriere (1930). Litvak's stay in Germany was cut short by the rise to power of Adolf Hitler. Litvak moved to France, and directed Mayerling (1936), starring Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux. This production was the turning point in Litvak's career, being a major hit on both sides of the Atlantic. He received effusive praise from critic Frank S. Nugent of the New York Times, who commented on the director's "superb assembling of scenes" and the "matchless performances" of the stars (September 14,1937). Hollywood soon beckoned, and, from 1937 to 1941, Litvak became a contract director for Warner Brothers. His first film was The Woman I Love (1937), which starred his future wife Miriam Hopkins. His experience with diverse aspects of stagecraft, as well as his fluency in four languages (Russian, German, French and English), enabled him to competently tackle a wide variety of subjects: from sophisticated continental comedy (Tovarich (1937)) to historical drama (Anastasia (1956)) and romance (All This, and Heaven Too (1940)).
Litvak was at his best directing taut, suspenseful crime dramas, such as The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938) with Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart, hailed by Variety as "an unquestionable winner"; and two tough action films starring John Garfield: Castle on the Hudson (1940) and Out of the Fog (1941). Having become an American citizen in 1940, Litvak enlisted in the US army and collaborated with Frank Capra on the wartime "Why we Fight" series of documentaries. At war's end he left the army with the rank of colonel and returned to Hollywood to direct the classic thriller Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) with Barbara Stanwyck. Arguably his best film was the superb psychological drama The Snake Pit (1948), Hollywood's first attempt to seriously examine the treatment of mental illness. Indeed, the film was so influential that it precipitated changes in the American mental health system. Litvak was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Director, but lost out to John Huston for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948).
In 1949, the director -- who had once described Hollywood as a "Mecca" -- returned to Europe and settled in Paris, working only infrequently. He undertook several projects under contract to 20th Century Fox (in 1951, and from 1955 to 1956). Notable among his later efforts are two contrasting films with Ingrid Bergman: the lavishly produced Anastasia (1956), about a woman claiming to be the Romanoff dynasty's last living direct descendant; and the moody, introspective romantic drama Goodbye Again (1961), shot on location in Paris. In stark thematic contrast to these, he also directed the suspenseful wartime thriller The Night of the Generals (1967), starring Peter O'Toole.
Anatole Litvak died in a hospital in Neuilly, Paris, in December 1974 at the age of 72.- Writer
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Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 22, 1899, the eldest of five children in a wealthy aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, Russia. His grandfather was a Justice Minister to the Czar Alexander II. His father, named Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a liberal political leader, the editor of a liberal newspaper, and was a friend of Sergei Diaghilev. His mother, named Elena Ivanovna (née Rukavishnikov), was the daughter of the wealthiest Russian goldmine owner.
Nabokov's family was trilingual. As a child he was already reading foreign writers Edgar Allan Poe, Gustave Flaubert, and the Russians Lev Tolstoy, Nikolay Gogol, and Anton Chekhov. He excelled in languages and literature, as well, as in soccer, tennis and chess. He was inspired by his father's studies in lepidoptery from the age of 7, and spent summers collecting butterflies in the family estate of Vyra, near St. Petersburg. He graduated from the most advanced and prestigious Tenishev School in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Nabokov's father was the Secretary of the Russian Provisional Government, when he was arrested during the Russian revolution of October, 1917, and the family estate was confiscated by the communists. The Nabokov family emigrated to London and then to Berlin. There Nabokov's father was murdered at a political meeting while shielding his opponent from assassins. The painful memory of his father's violent death would echo in many of Nabokov's writings. In 1923 Nabokov graduated with honors from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied zoology and literature. He worked as a translator and tutor in Europe for 18 years. In 1925 he married Vera Evseevna Slonim, from a Russian-Jewish family, and their son Dimitri was born in 1934.
Traumatized by the death of his father and the loss of his home country, Nabokov expressed himself in writing. His novel 'The Luzhin Defence' (1930) is alluding to his own story of emigration and the sense of loss. In 1937 his father's killer was released by Adolf Hitler, and Nabokov had to move to Paris. Three years later he fled from the advancing German Armies to the United States, with his wife and son. In 1940 he crossed the Atlantic Ocean on the Champlain, where he had a first class cabin, paid with the money from the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. In 1945 Nabokov became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He taught literature at Cornell University and worked as entomologist at Harvard University, becoming a distinguished lepidopterist.
He published short stories in the Atlantic and the New Yorker magazines in English, while still writing his memoirs in Russian, and agonizing to switch from Russian to English. It took him 6 years to complete "Lolita" (1955), a controversial story of a pedophile's desire for a 12-year-old girl, who reminds him of the little girl he loved as a boy. The novel was banned in America and the UK until 1958. He later wrote a screenplay for the film Lolita (1962), directed by Stanley Kubrick. Lolita and "Pale Fire" (1962) are his best known novels. In 1964 Nabokov published his four-volume translation of 'Eugene Onegin' by Alexander Pushkin, on which he worked for 10 years. He later made English translations of poems by Mikhail Lermontov and Fyodor Tyutchev. His own later works: the artfully constructed 'Ada' (1969), 'Transparent Things' (1972), and the autobiographic 'Look at the Harlequins' (1975), were translated into Russian by his son Dimitri. Nabokov also published scholarly works on Nikolay Gogol, James Joyce and Franz Kafka.
In 1960 Nabokov moved to Switzerland and made his home at the Montreux Palace Hotel. From there he frequently traveled to Milan, Italy, where his son Dimitri Nabokov was an opera singer at the La Scala. Nabokov's main hobby was his immense collection of rare butterflies which grew to a museum-quality with his many entomological expeditions. He never learned to drive a car, and he depended on his wife Vera to drive him around. Nabokov's individualism manifested in his ironic rejection of any mass-psychology, especially Marxism, Freudism, etc. He never used telephones, thus preventing any outside influence over his way of life. He had a rare gift of synaesthesia, cognate with that of composer Alexander Scriabin and artist Wassily Kandinsky. Nabokov also made his name in chess by composing chess problems.
Vladimir Nabokov died on July 2, 1977, in Montreux Palace Hotel, and was laid to rest in the Clarens Cemetery, Montreux, Switzerland. His wife and muse, Vera Slonim, died in 1993, and was laid to rest with Nabokov. The family mansion of Nabokov's in St. Petersburg, Russia is now a Nabokov's Museum. His first collection of butterflies is now part of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. His last and most valuable butterfly collection was bequeathed to the Zoology Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.- Director
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Rouben Mamoulian was born on 8 October 1897 in Tiflis, Russian Empire [now Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia]. He was a director and writer, known for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Applause (1929) and Becky Sharp (1935). He was married to Catharine Azadia Newman. He died on 4 December 1987 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.- The brother of actress Tamara Shayne, he was to join the Moscow Arts Theatre, but World War I intervened, and then he fought with General Pyotr Wrangel and the White Armies. Although he received few significant roles, he was outstanding in None But the Lonely Heart (1944) as Ike Weber, and in The Stranger (1946) as Gen. Meinike, where his character dominates the first 15 minutes of the film. His performance in Danny Kaye's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) is also highly regarded. His performance in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) was considered outstanding, but was cut from the release print. Not an ambitious actor, Shayne was dedicated to his family, including his second wife, Marjorie.
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- Script and Continuity Department
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860, the third of six children to a family of a grocer, in Taganrog, Russia, a southern seaport and resort on the Azov Sea. His father, a 3rd-rank Member of the Merchant's Guild, was a religious fanatic and a tyrant who used his children as slaves. Young Chekhov was a part-time assistant in his father's business and also a singer in a church choir. At age 15, he was abandoned by his bankrupt father and lived alone for 3 years while finishing the Classical Gymnazium in Taganrog. Chekhov obtained a scholarship at the Moscow University Medical School in 1879, from which he graduated in 1884 as a Medical Doctor. He practiced general medicine for about ten years.
While a student, Chekhov published numerous short stories and humorous sketches under a pseudonym. He reserved his real name for serious medical publications, saying "medicine is my wife; literature - a mistress." While a doctor, he kept writing and had success with his first books, and his first play "Ivanov." He gradually decreased his medical practice in favor of writing. Chekhov created his own style based on objectivity, brevity, originality, and compassion. It was different from the mainstream Russian literature's scrupulous analytical depiction of "heroes." Chekhov used a delicate fabric of hints, subtle nuances in dialogs, and precise details. He described his original style as an "objective manner of writing." He avoided stereotyping and instructive political messages in favor of cool comic irony. Praised by writers Lev Tolstoy and Nikolai Leskov, he was awarded the Pushkin Prize from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1888.
In 1890, Chekhov made a lengthy journey to Siberia and to the remote prison-island of Sakhalin. There, he surveyed thousands of convicts and conducted research for a dissertation about the life of prisoners. His research grew bigger than a dissertation, and in 1894, he published a detailed social-analytical essay on the Russian penitentiary system in Siberia and the Far East, titled "Island of Sakhalin." Chekhov's valuable research was later used and quoted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his "Gulag Archipelago." In 1897-1899, Chekhov returned to his medical practice in order to stop the epidemic of cholera.
Chekhov developed special relationship with Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Moscow Art Theater. He emerged as a mature playwright who influenced the modern theater. In the plays "Uncle Vanya," "Three Sisters," "Seagull," and "Cherry Orchard," he mastered the use of understatement, anticlimax, and implied emotion. The leading actress of the Moscow Art Theater, Olga Knipper-Chekhova, became his wife. In 1898, Chekhov moved to his Mediterranean-style home at the Black Sea resort of Yalta in the Crimea. There he was visited by writers Lev Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Ivan Bunin, and artists Konstantin Korovin and Isaac Levitan.- Ivan Triesault was born on 13 July 1898 in Reval, Russian Empire [now Tallinn, Harjumaa, Estonia]. He was an actor, known for Notorious (1946), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and The Amazing Transparent Man (1960). He died on 3 January 1980 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
- Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Kiev Province, now the Ukraine, to Polish parents Apollo Korzeniowski and Ewa Bobrowska. His father was a political activist and he and his family were exiled after he was suspected of involvement with revolutionary activities. Conrad had no friends as a child and rarely associated with boys or girls. His mother had always been a sickly person and died of tuberculosis in 1865. Conrad's father sent him to live with his uncle and pursue his education in France. Conrad's father died in 1869, also of tuberculosis. Conrad became an officer on British ships and spent two decades on various ships. Conrad was inspired to write "Heart of Darkness" after voyaging to Congo in 1890. In 1894, Conrad published his first novel and in 1896 he married Jessie George, an on-again off-again girlfriend. Conrad had few friends in adulthood, mainly fellow authors such as Stephen Crane and Henry James. Conrad died of a heart attack in 1924.
- Kurt Katch was born on 28 January 1896 in Grodno, Poland, Russian Empire [now Hrodna, Belarus]. He was an actor, known for The Seventh Cross (1944), The Mask of Dimitrios (1944) and The Mummy's Curse (1944). He was married to Hinda Ryfka Kleinlerer. He died on 14 August 1958 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
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Born in Russian Empire to a Ukrainian father and a Swedish mother, Anna Sten studied at the Russian Film Academy and joined the Moscow Art Theater. Strikingly beautiful, she went on to appear in a number of Russian silent films, but it was in the German film Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff (1931) that Anna gained notice. Samuel Goldwyn saw a picture of Anna in the paper and rushed to view the film. After the first reel he sent word to sign her, hoping to develop her into a star of the magnitude of Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich. His agent signed Anna to a contract but forgot to mention the fact that she didn't speak a word of English, which made her appearance in sound pictures questionable. She spent a year studying English every day and working out makeup and acting. Goldwyn publicity called her "The Passionate Peasant" and sold her image to papers all over America. However, her first American picture, Nana (1934), even though almost completely rewritten and re-shot from the original, didn't bring audiences into the theaters. While Anna was looked great, the script and picture were average. Her second film, We Live Again (1934), marginally better suited to her style, also died within weeks at the box office. After her third film for Goldwyn, The Wedding Night (1935), also flopped, she and Goldwyn parted company after it became known around Hollywood as "Goldwyn's Last Sten." Anna made a few more movies, but by the end of the decade she was forgotten.- Gregory Rasputin was one of Russia's most controversial and mysterious figures who posed as a "holy man" and destroyed the political image and reputation of Russia's Emperor Tsar Nicholas II and his family through a series of political manipulations, disgusting scandals and treachery, provoking a huge wave of public anger and helping the communists to prepare the disastrous Russian revolution. His mysterious activity is still disputed by historians and religious authors, mostly because he left no papers or documents with the exception of a few messages, while acting behind-the-scenes inside the Palaces of the Russian Tsars, and he remained inaccessible to public because of the heavy security that surrounded the Russian Imperial family.
He was born Gregory Efimovich Rasputin in 1869 into a Russian peasant family in Pokrovskoye village, Tobolsk province in Siberia. He was the only surviving child of Efim Yakovlevich Rasputin and Anna Vasilevna Rasputina--their four previous children died before he was born. The family name, Rasputin, has a negative connotation, similar to "ill-behaved" or "ill-aimed". His mother died when Rasputin was young and his father was imprisoned for some time. Gregory had very little schooling and was unable to read or write. At age 16 he was arrested for theft, and the citizens of Pokrovskoe appealed to the authorities to excommunicate and exile him. Rasputin was sentenced to three months in prison, which was later commuted to serving his term at Verkhoturye Monastery in Siberia. Rasputin settled with the lonely monk Makariy, who lived in a rugged hut and practiced rituals akin to ancient shamanic and tribal traditions of the Siberian people. Rasputin mentioned that Makariy had cured him of a severe sleep disorder and trained him to practice hypnotism and a vegetarian lifestyle, which included some alcohol and also the use of various weeds and drugs for "spiritual transformation" according to ancient shamanic rituals.
Rasputin stated later that he modeled himself after Makariy. At that time he became interested in manipulating people through their weaknesses and beliefs, including use of their personal and social habits as well as their politics and religion. He was also introduced to the banned mystical sect of Khlysty (flagellants), whose had a strong sexual content among other exotic practices. Rasputin evolved into a cynical and ruthless manipulator who practiced his principle that "any sin shall make me a holy man" and was spreading his beliefs around. In 1889 Rasputin married Praskovia Feodorovna and had three children, but left his family in Siberia and became a wanderer. He walked across Russia on foot from Siberia to Kiev and back several times during the 1890s, then made a pilgrimage on foot to Greece and Jerusalem during 1901, walking back to Russia and staying in Kazan with a local priest who gave him a letter of recommendation to St. Peterburg, the Russian capital. He arrived in the city in 1903, and solicited money to build a church in his home village of Pokrovskoe. In St. Petersburg Rasputin was accommodated by none other than Father Sergiy (who later, in 1942, was appointed by Joseph Stalin the Head of Orthodox Christianity in the Soviet Union), who was at that time Director of St. Petersburg Holy Academy and Seminary and also was a clandestine political opponent of Tsar Nicholas II. At several reception parties staged by Father Sergiy, Rasputin stunned St. Petersburg society by his forecasts that Russia would be defeated in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904, and that the Russian navy "would sink down", which was exactly what happened next.
Soon the Ober-Procurator of Russia, Pobedonostsev, issued a ban on public appearances of Father Sergiy and Rasputin, declaring that Rasputin was hiding his manipulative traits under the cover of "holyness" and illegally declared himself an Orthodox Christian mystic. Rasputin, however, ignored that ban and continued posing as a "prophet" and healer. He continued his wanderings as a self-proclaimed "holy man", often using lies and hypnotism to intimidate people into submission and then used them for his own goals. He made loose affiliations with various monasteries, then appointed himself a religious "elder" in St. Petersburg. At that time mystical interpretations of Christianity were in vogue, and official Orthodox Christianity was losing its control over people amidst the proliferation of disastrous wars and civil unrest, including revolutions. After the failure of several "religious advisers" to bring peace into the seriously dysfunctional Russian royal family of Tsar Nicholas II, Rasputin was summoned by Anna Vyrubova and the famous ascetic mystic, Father Theofan, the religious adviser to the royal family. In October of 1905 Father Sergiy and Father Theofan arranged Rasputin's introduction to the royal household through some relatives of reigning Romanov family. Rasputin instantly found a way to use the weaknesses and insecurities of Crown Prince Aleksey Nikolaeyvitch Romanov, whose incurable illness--he was a hemophiliac, having inherited the disease from his grandmother, Britain's Queen Victoria--was the main concern of the royal family. Rasputin convinced the Empress, Tsarina Alexandra, that he could improve the health of young Crown Prince Aleksey. Both Tsar Nicholas II and his wife were devastated and demoralized by their son's illness, and their anxiety and desperation was used by Rasputin, and the people behind him, in a crafty way to achieve goals that suited their political agenda.
At the same time Tsar Nicholas was warned by his loyal prime minister, Count Stolypin, that Rasputin was a dangerous fraud who could become a threat to the royal family and to Russia. However, at Tsar Nicholas' insistence, Stolypin had a private meeting with Rasputin. Not long afterward Stolypin was assassinated by a hired terrorist, and the resulting investigation by the authorities was stopped order of the Emperor. Stolypin's records revealed that he had an argument with Rasputin, but he was stopped and intimidated by the hypnotic stare of Rasputin's piercing eyes. Stolypin and many other political figures of that time had documented that Rasputin had "satanic eyes" and he was possessed of a powerful and hypnotic glare that he used to intimidate and cow his enemies. Rasputin also often used verbal abuse and intimidation, including the most foul profanities--a practice considered shocking in the rarefied air of the Russian court--to intimidate and manipulate people into submission. At the height of his political influence, Rasputin was constantly guarded by six agents provided by the Russian security service by order of Tsarina Alexandra. Also by the Imperial order Rasputin was given a new name, Novykh, meaning the "new man", an exclamation attributed to the suffering boy, Crown Prince Aleksey.
Rasputin apparently persuaded both the Empress and her ailing son to ensure that he kept a permanent presence in the tsar's palaces, and he was appointed to an official court position as "personal healer" to Crown Prince Aleksey Nikolaeyvitch Romanov. Rasputin may had some limited beneficial effect on Prince Aleksey's condition through hypnotism, but it apparently was enough to convince both the Empress and the Prince to depend more and more on Rasputin's presence and his hypnotic abilities. Rasputin also insisted that real medical doctors should be kept away from Alexey, constantly telling the family, "Don't let the doctors bother him, let him rest." On the occasions when Aleksey's health had actually improved, Rasputin used the opportunity to take personal credit for the Prince's "improvement", thereby solidifying his control over access to the royal family.
The Empress became a patron of Rasputin, who soon established himself as an extremely powerful figure within the Russian court. The Emperor was calling Rasputin a "holy man" and referred to him as "our friend". Rasputin referred to the Emperor and the Empress only as "papa" and "mama" and always used a frank and "sincere" tone in conversations with the royal family. Meanwhile, government security sources reported about wild orgies at the many parties and gatherings at Rasputin's residence, located just a few blocks away from the Tsar's palace and paid for out of the Russian Treasury. Rasputin's drinking binges were reported as "massive and wild" that often degenerated into drunken and violent sex orgies, designed to entangle politicians and other guests who could prove useful to Rasputin's ambitions. He aggressively indoctrinated his victims by using, among other methods, his motto "Sin that you may obtain forgiveness!", which was in line with the views he learned from the sect of Khlysty.
Soon Rasputin and people behind him succeeded in using his influence to entangle many politicians in scandals, including dirty manipulations involving their wives, drinking parties, promiscuity, and massive embezzlement of the government funds during the First World War, by diverting money to special interests through insiders within the Treasury of Russia. Rasputin also manipulated the Empress Tsarina Alexandra to make controversial political appointments, which led to a bitter divide within all classes of the Russian society, causing a blow to the public image of the Imperial House of the Romanovs. Rasputin's manipulative activities provoked many conflicts within the Russian government and the Russian military command during the First World War. Rasputin was using his position inside the Tsar's Palace to directly interfere with Tsar's communications with the government and media, thus undermining the Tsar's public image. At several times Rasputin was able to interfere with the Tsar's schedule of meetings with political figures as well as military commanders during the war.
In 1914, while visiting a church in Siberian city of Tobolsk, Rasputin was attacked by his former prostitute-friend, Khionia Guseva, who then turned a religious disciple of monk Iliodor. Ms. Guseva approached Rasputin with a knife and wounded him in the stomach, but he recovered from the wound and soon gained an even stronger influence on the Empress Tsarina Alexandra. Later Ms. Guseva said to the Grand Jury that she acted in clear mind and full understanding that "Rasputin is the Antichrist harmful to the people of Russia." However she was declared insane and was forcefully placed in an asylum in Siberia. Rasputin's most destructive actions were committed in 1916, when he convinced the Tsar Nicholas II to move from the Russian capital, St. Petersburg, to the front-lines in Belarus, leaving the Empress Alexandra alone under his influence and in charge of internal politics of the country. In absence of the Tsar, St. Petersburg was surreptitiously over-taken by the revolutionary communists, who penetrated into many regiments of the Army, the Navy, as well as into the local political circles in the capital of Russia, thus preparing for the Communist Revolution of 1917. The decade of Rasputin's destructive manipulations led to irreparable political and economic damage and caused a bitter divide within the government and military command, as well as within all social layers of Russia. At that time the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue made a record that the "Russian Empress is mystically devoted to Rasputin."
Communist leader Vladimir Lenin wrote, "monstrous Rasputin is pushing the Tsar's regime to a disaster", which was helping the communist revolution. According to historians Rasputin was used by a secret group behind the communist revolutionaries, which acted to destroy the Romanov dynasty and the monarchy, and eventually fulfilled their plans and came to power through revolution. That explained how and why Rasputin was manipulated to discredit the royal family and personally the Tsar Nicholas II. Rasputin's main handler was a St. Petersburg's underworld drug lord, named Dr. Badmayev, who controlled Rasputin through his drug addiction and often instructed Rasputin about his political moves. Rasputin often stayed overnight after having a fix at Dr. Badmayev's home in St. Petersburg. At the same time, Rasputin's hypnotic influence over the Empress Alexandra and the Crown Prince Alexey remained very strong, allowing him to make political, ecclesiastical and military appointments for those who served his interests. Rasputin created and used public scandals and rumors about his sexual and alcoholic excesses, and designed crafty entrapments for many members of the Russian political establishment into orgies and scandals for immediate blackmail and exploitation. He polarized the society by using his political influence in securing the appointments and dismissals of several military commanders and government ministers during the First World War. Rasputin's abuse of power and his notorious debauchery was used by the communist propaganda to depict Rasputin with the Empress Alexandra in numerous pornographic comics, drawings and provocative publications as part of a massive negative publicity campaign against the House of Romanovs and the Russian monarchy. In the communist propaganda Rasputin was shown as a peasant who turned the Russian Tsar into a wimp, so the country was in "bad hands" and "proletarians must join with peasants to overthrow the monarchy and take power", so declared the communist leader Vladimir Lenin, who in turn was secretly financed by the German military.
In 1916, during the most difficult time in the First World War, brothers of Tsar Nicholas II obtained evidence that Rasputin was secretly negotiating a peace treaty with Germany while Russia's position in the war was not good. Rasputin said on record that "too many peasants were dead because of the war", indicating his agenda to settle "peace at any cost" which was also in line with the communist propaganda, and helped the German Armies. Peasants deserted from the Russian Army by hundreds of thousands, then armed peasants came to St. Petersburg and joined the communist revolutionary brigades. Rasputin's secret activity and his contacts with the Germans became a political scandal. Tsar's cousin, Grand Prince Nicholas, announced that he wants to hang Rasputin for treachery as a spy in German employ, albeit Rasputin was under the protection of the Empress Tsarina Alexandra, who herself was German. That led to a plot by a group of aristocrats, led by Prince Feliks Yusupov, a relative of the Tsar, to assassinate him, but Rasputin was officially guarded by six agents from the Russian Imperial Security under constant supervision of specially assigned officers who lived in Rasputin's house in St. Petersburg.
In November of 1916, Prince Yusupov pretended that he had chest pains and obtained a high recommendation to become a patient of Rasputin. Prince Feliks Yusupov made several visits to Rasputin as a patient and soon he made friends with Rasputin and presented him a picture of his wife, beautiful Princess Irene Yusupov, niece of the Emperor Tsar Nicholas II. Rasputin immediately became horny and expressed his desire to meet the beauty. On December 16, 1916, Prince Yusupov and his fellow officers designed a plan centered on using the beautiful Princess Irina Yusupov, as a bait. On December 29, 1916, Prince Feliks Yusupov personally invited Rasputin to a dinner and drove him to Yusupov's Moika Palace in St. Petersburg. There Rasputin was waiting for the appearance of the Princess Irina Yusupov, but she never showed up. Meanwhile, Rasputin was plied with wine and food that had been laced with cyanide, albeit the plotters were oblivious to the fact of chemistry that cyanide is often neutralized by some ingredients in food, as it turns into a harmless salt in most desserts and wines. Rasputin also had a condition with hyper-acidity and post-surgical stomach problems which caused him to minimize his intake of sugar and alcohol. When the poison had no apparent effect on Rasputin, Prince Feliks Yusupov pulled out his gun and fired, but Rasputin's life was saved because the first bullet was reflected by the hard metal button on his coat, he was wounded, but still managed to jump up and tried to escape out of the Moika Palace. Then Prince Yusupov and Count Vladimir Purishkevich together with their friend, British intelligence officer Oswald Rayner, pulled out their guns and fired at Rasputin, then, noticing that he was still trying to get up, they clubbed him into submission. In the early morning of December 30, 1916, members of the plot wrapped Rasputin and dragged him into the icy waters until he finally drowned in the Neva River.
Even after his death, Rasputin still remained dangerous and could be used as a destructive and divisive tool, because he left a wild and threatening message to Emperor Tsar Nicholas II and Alexandra, predicting their death and disaster for Russia. Crown Prince Alexey remained gravely ill and was heavily dependent and conditioned to Rasputin's hypnotic influence. Rasputin's body was buried upon Empress Alexandra's and Prince Alexey's request at the location in the park of Tsarkoe Selo, near the Summer Palace of the Russian Tsars. Two months after Rasputin's assassination, Emperor Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, then was arrested as citizen Romanov who was obediently sweeping snow from roads while waiting for his sentence under supervision of communist revolutionaries. Soon both Nicholas and Alexandra became increasingly paranoid about having Rasputin's grave next to his Summer Palace. Ironically, Tsar Nicholas II was under the house arrest in that same palace during the year of 1917, and both Empress Alexandra and Prince Alexey were not allowed to make visits to Rasputin's grave, which was vandalized by revolutionaries in search for valuables. By that time, Rasputin's body was removed upon the order from Aleksandr Kerensky, the head of the Russian provisional government, who previously was a student at the same school and at the same time with the future communist leader Vladimir Lenin. Initially Kerensky ordered to remove Rasputin's body to a remote cemetery, but during the move, Rasputin's body, masked as a piano in a wooden box, was destroyed in the fire started by a group of revolutionaries. Shortly after the Communist Revolution, the entire family of Tsar Tsar Nicholas II with his wife and five children were executed, then Tsar's Palaces were vandalized by the revolutionary communists and Rasputin's grave was again burglarized by poor proletarians in search for jewelery.
Later, while in emigration outside of the Communist Russia (then Soviet Union), both accounts by Prince Feliks Yusupov (who lived through the 1960s) and Count Vladimir Purishkevich (who died in the 1920s) were published in their respectful books of memoirs about their plot and assassination of Rasputin in the context of their participation in the historic events. Prince Yusupov compared Rasputin's cynical and manipulative treatment of the Tsar's family to the Communist Party's ruthless methods of control over innocent people of Russia. Rasputin's own "religious" speeches were interpreted and recorded by his enchanted admirers and titled "holy wanderings" and "holy thoughts" when first published in Russia in 1907 and in 1915. In 1942, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin appointed the notorious St. Petersburg Bishop Sergiy the Patriarch of Orthodix Christianity in the Soviet Union. Then Patriarch Sergiy brought back the name of Gregory Rasputin from oblivion. At the same time some sectarian monks organized rumors about possible canonization of Gregory Rasputin as a "martyr and saint" who was assassinated by the family of the "bad" tsar.
Rasputin's daughter, Matrena Solovyova-Rasputina, and her husband, Boris Solovyov, who secretly collaborated with the Communist regime, took money and jewelery from Empress Tsarina Alexandra in exchange for a promise of assist the Tsar Nicholas II and his family to escape from the Communist regime. They betrayed the Tsar and his family and left them to be killed by the communists, while themselves escaped to France. There Rasputin's daughter, who was money hungry, read the memoirs of Prince Feliks Yusupov, and filed several law suits against Prince Yusupov, who gave accounts of Rasputin's death under oath in 1934 and 1965. Eventually Rasputin's daughter ended up working for a circus as a tiger tamer, then she moved to Los Angeles, and died there in 1977. - Music Department
- Composer
- Writer
Pyotr (Peter) Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk, Vyatka region, Russia. He was the second of six children (five brothers and one sister). His father, named Ilya Chaikovsky, was a mining business executive in Votkinsk. His father's ancestors were from Ukraine and Poland. His mother, named Aleksandra Assier, was of Russian and French ancestry.
Tchaikovsky played piano since the age of 5, he also enjoyed his mother's playing and singing. He was a sensitive and emotional child, and became deeply traumatized by the death of his mother of cholera, in 1854. At that time he was sent to a boarding school in St. Petersburg. He graduated from the St. Petersburg School of Law in 1859, then worked for 3 years at the Justice Department of Russian Empire. In 1862-1865 he studied music under Anton Rubinstein at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. In 1866-1878 he was a professor of theory and harmony at the Moscow Conservatory. At that time he met Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz, who visited Russia with concert tours. During that period Tchaikovsky wrote his first ballet 'The Swan Lake', opera 'Eugene Onegin', four Symphonies, and the brilliant Piano Concerto No1.
As a young man Tchaikovsky suffered traumatic personal experiences. He was sincerely attached to a beautiful soprano, named Desiree Artot, but their engagement was destroyed by her mother and she married another man. His homosexuality was causing him a painful guilt feeling. In 1876 he wrote to his brother, Modest, about his decision to "marry whoever will have me." One of his admirers, a Moscow Conservatory student Antonina Ivanovna Milyukova, was persistently writing him love letters. She threatened to take her life if Tchaikovsky didn't marry her. Their brief marriage in the summer of 1877 lasted only a few weeks and caused him a nervous breakdown. He even made a suicide attempt by throwing himself into a river. In September of 1877 Tchaikovsky separated from Milyukova. She eventually ended up in an insane asylum, where she spent over 20 years and died. They never saw each other again. Although their marriage was terminated legally, Tchaikovsky generously supported her financially until his death.
Tchaikovsky was ordered by the doctors to leave Russia until his emotional health was restored. He went to live in Europe for a few years. Tchaikovsky settled together with his brother, Modest, in a quiet village of Clarens on Lake Geneva in Switzerland and lived there in 1877-1878. There he wrote his very popular Violin Concerto in D. He also completed his Symphony No.4, which was inspired by Russian folk songs, and dedicated it to Nadezhda von Meck. From 1877 to 1890 Tchaikovsky was financially supported by a wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck, who also supported Claude Debussy. She loved Tchaikovsky's music and became his devoted pen-friend. They exchanged over a thousand letters in 14 years; but they never met, at her insistence. In 1890 she abruptly terminated all communication and support, claiming bankruptcy.
Tchaikovsky played an important role in the artistic development of Sergei Rachmaninoff. They met in 1886, when Rachmaninov was only 13 years old, and studied the music of Tchaikovsky under the tutelage of their mutual friend, composer Aleksandr Zverev. Tchaikovsky was the member of the Moscow conservatory graduation board. He joined many other musicians in recommendation that Rachmaninov was to be awarded the Gold Medal in 1892. Later Tchaikovsky was involved in popularization of Rachmaninov's graduation work, opera 'Aleko'. Upon Tchaikovsky's promotion Rachmaninov's opera "Aleko" was included in the repertory and performed at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.
In 1883-1893 Tchaikovsky wrote his best Symphonies No.5 and No.6, ballets 'The Sleeping Beauty' and 'The Nutcracker', operas 'The Queen of Spades' and 'Iolanta'. In 1888-1889, he made a successful conducting tour of Europe, appearing in Prague, Leipzig, Hamburg, Paris, and London. In 1891, he went on a two month tour of America, where he gave concerts in New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. In May of 1891 Tchaikovsky was the conductor on the official opening night of Carnegie Hall in New York. He was a friend of Edvard Grieg and Antonín Dvorák. In 1892 he heard Gustav Mahler conducting his opera 'Eugene Onegin' in Hamburg. Tchaikovsky himself conducted the premiere of his Symphony No.6 in St. Petersburg, Russia, on the 16th of October, 1893. A week later he died of cholera after having a glass of tap water. He was laid to rest in the Necropolis of Artists at St. Aleksandr Nevsky Monastery in St. Petersburg, Russia.- Music Department
- Composer
- Writer
Irving Berlin was born Israel Isidor Baline on May 11, 1888 in Mogilev, Belarus, Russian Empire. Towering composer, songwriter, ("God Bless America", "Always", "Blue Skies", "White Christmas") author and publisher, he came to the United States at age 5 and was educated in New York's public schools. His earliest musical education was from his father, a cantor. He earned Honorary degrees from Bucknell University and Temple University. Beginning his career as a song-plugger for publisher Harry von Tilzer, Berlin worked as a singing waiter in Chinatown. In 1909, he was hired as a staff lyricist by the Ted Snyder Company, and became a partner to that firm four years later.
In 1910, he began doing vaudeville appearances in the United States and abroad, and also appeared with Snyder in the Broadway musical "Up and Down Broadway", that ran for 72 performances. He joined ASCAP as a charter member in 1914, and served on its first board of directors between 1914-1918. Berlin enlisted the United States Army infantry in World War I, and was a sergeant at Camp Upton, New York. After the war, he established his own public-relations firm, and in 1921, he built the 1025-seat Music Box Theatre (at 239 W. 45th Street, New York) with Sam H. Harris. After Harris' death in 1941, Berlin assumed full ownership and the theatre remains a Broadway institution to this day.
Among his many awards was the Medal for Merit for his 1942 all-soldier show "This Is the Army", which toured the United States, Europe and South Pacific battle zones; all proceeds were assigned to Army Emergency Relief and other service agencies. Berlin was also a member of the French Legion of Honor and held the Congressional Medal of Honor for "God Bless America", the proceeds from which went to the God Bless America Fund. His songs were sung by Fred Astaire, Al Jolson, Judy Garland, Bing Crosby, Dick Powell, Alice Faye and many others. Irving Berlin died at the age of 101 of natural causes on September 22, 1989 in New York City.- Director
- Additional Crew
Konstantin Stanislavski was a wealthy Russian businessman turned director who founded the Moscow Art Theatre, and originated the Stanislavski's System of acting which was spread over the world by his students, such as Michael Chekhov, Aleksei Dikij, Stella Adler, Viktor Tourjansky, and Richard Boleslawski among many others.
He was born Konstantin Sergeevich Alekseev on January 5, 1863, in Moscow, Russia. His father, Sergei Alekseev, was a wealthy Russian merchant. His mother, Elisaveta Vasilevna (nee Yakovleva) was French-Russian and his grandmother was a notable actress in Paris. Young Stanislavski grew up in a bilingual environment. He was fond of theatre and arts, studied piano and singing, and performed amateur plays at home with his elder brother and two sisters. He studied business and languages at Lasarevsky Institute, the most prestigious private school in Moscow. He did not graduate, instead he continued self-education while traveling in several European countries and studying at libraries and museums. Eventually Stanislavski joined his father's company, became a successful businessman, and the head of his father's business, the Alekseev's factory and other assets. During the 1880s Stanislavski made a fortune in international business and trade, he was awarded the Gold Medal at the World's Fair in Paris. At the same time, he was an active patron of arts and theatre in Russia. In 1885 he studied acting and directing at the Maly Theatre in Moscow, and took a stage name Stanislavski. In 1888 he founded the "Society for Arts and Literature" in Moscow.
In 1898 Stanislavski together with his partner, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, founded the Moscow Art Theatre, which made a profound influence on theatrical art all over the world. They opened with staging of "Tsar Feodor" a play by Aleksei Tolstoy, then staged "The Seagull" written by Anton Chekhov specially for the Moscow Art Theatre. In 1900 Stanislavski brought the Moscow Art Theatre on tour in Sebastopol and Yalta in Crimea, where he invited then ailing Anton Chekhov to see several plays. Chekhov admired the company's stage production of his plays, and respected the theatrical achievements of Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Chekhov's legendary collaboration with the Moscow Art Theatre was fruitful for both sides: it resulted in creation of such classics as 'The Seagull', 'Uncle Vanya', 'The Three Sisters', and 'The Cherry Orchard', the four big plays which remained in the repertoire ever since.
Stanislavski's system was developed through his own cross-cultural experience as actor, director, and businessman. He constantly updated his method through inter-disciplinary studies, absorbing from a range of sources and influences, such as the modernist developments, yoga and Pavlovian behaviorist psychology. He introduced group rehearsals and relaxation techniques to achieve better spiritual connections between actors. Pavlovian approach worked well by conditioning actors through discipline in longer, organized rehearsals, and using a thorough analysis of characters. Stanislavski himself was involved in a long and arduous practice making every actor better prepared for stage performance and eventually producing a less rigid acting style. In his own words, Stanislavski described his early approach as "Spiritual Realism." His actors worked hard to deliver perfectly believable performances, as none of his actors wanted to hear his famous verdict, "I don't believe."
As an actor, Stanislavski starred in several classical plays. His most notable stage performances, such as Othello in the Shakespeare's 'Othello', and as Gayev in Chekhov's 'The Cherry Orchard', were acclaimed by critics and loved by public. His own students said that Stanislavski was a very comfortable partner on stage, due to his highly professional and truthful acting. At the same time, he could be very demanding off stage, because of his high standards, especially during his lengthy and rigorous rehearsals, requiring nothing less but the full devotion from each actor of his company, the Moscow Art Theatre.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, his factory and all other business property was nationalized by the Soviet Communists, but he was allowed to own his mansion in Moscow. Stanislavski wisely let go of all his wealth and possessions and expressed himself in writing and directing. He remained the principal director of Moscow Art Theatre for the rest of his life. During the turbulent years before and after the Russian Revolution, and later in the 1920s and 30s, he witnessed bitter rivalry among his former students. Some actors emigrated from Russia, others fought for their share of success, and the Moscow Art Theatre was eventually divided into several companies.
In 1928 Stanislavski suffered from a heart attack. He then distanced himself from disputes and competition between his former students Michael Chekhov and Aleksei Dikij, whose individual ambitions resulted in further fragmentation of the original Moscow Art Theatre company. At the same time, his younger apprentice, Nikolay Khmelyov, remained loyal to the teacher, and eventually later filled the position held by Stanislavski at Moscow Art Theatre. However, his other students, such as Vsevolod Meyerhold and Yevgeni Vakhtangov founded their own theatre companies and continued using their versions of the Stanislavski's system. In the 1930s, Stanislavski together with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko formed one more theatrical company in Moscow, the Musical Theatre of Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko.
Stanislavski was a proponent of democratic ideas, such as equal opportunity and equal value of every human being on the planet. At that time Stanislavski's nephew was arrested for political reasons, and died in the Gulag prison-camp. Stanislavsky was also under permanent surveillance, because his Moscow Art Theatre was frequently attended by Joseph Stalin and other Soviet strongmen. However, at that time Moscow Art Theatre became especially popular, because Russian intellectuals needed a cultural oasis to escape from the grim Soviet reality. Under Stanislavski the Moscow Art Theatre produced several brilliant plays by Mikhail A. Bulgakov, and also continued running such classics as 'The Seagull', 'The Cherry Orchard', 'The Lower Bottom' and other original productions of plays by Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky.
In his later years, Stanislavsky wrote a book titled "An Actor Prepares" which, in Charley Chaplin's words, ".. helps all people to reach out for big dramatic art. It tells what an actor needs to rouse the inspiration he requires for expressing profound emotions." Stanislavsky explained how actors may use his System, "Create your own method. Don't depend slavishly on mine. Make up something that will work for you! But keep braking traditions, I beg you!" And that was exactly what the best of his followers did. Stanislavski's ideas were used by many acting teachers, such as Michael Chekhov, Stella Adler, and Lee Strasberg, among others across the world.
During the 1930s Konstantin Stanislavski directed the original productions of several classic Russian plays, such as "Na Dne" (aka.. The Lower Depths) by Maxim Gorky, "Tsar Fedor Ioannovich" by A.K. Tolstoy, and other plays at the Moscow Art Theatre. After Stanislavski's death his original theatrical productions were adapted to black and white films, where Stanislavsky is credited as the original theatrical director. He died of a heart failure on August 7, 1938, in Moscow and was laid to rest in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, Russia.
Stanislavski's mansion in central Moscow is now a public museum and research center displaying a collection of original stage sets and theatrical costumes. Stanislavski's personal library is also part of his museum. It has rare books that he collected in his numerous travels, as well as original manuscripts and letters by Stanislavski.- Music Department
- Composer
- Soundtrack
Frédéric François Chopin was born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin, on March 1, 1810, in Zelazowa Wola, Masovia region, Duchy of Warsaw, Poland. His father, named Mikolaj (Nicolas) Chopin, was a Frenchman who came to Poland from Lorraine, and eventually became professor at Warsaw Lyceum. His mother, named Tekla Justina Krzyzanovska, was a relative of Polish Countess Ludwika Skarbkowa, owner of the Zelazowa Wola estate.
From 1816-1822 Chopin studied piano under professional musician Wojcech Zywny. He wrote his first piano compositions at the age of 7. In 1820, then ten-year-old Chopin moved with his parents to Warsaw. There he gained a reputation as a "second Mozart" for his piano playing. From 1823-1826 Chopin studied at the Warsaw Lyceum. In 1824 he was influenced by the Jewish folklore and composed Mazurka in A minor, called "The Jewish" by Chopin himself. From 1826-1830 he studied at the Warsaw Conservatory under pianist Wilhelm Wurfel and composer Josef Elsner. In 1829 Chopin attended a performance of Niccolò Paganini in Warsaw. In the same year Chopin gave solo concerts in Vienna and premiered his Piano Concerto No.1 in F minor. In 1830 he premiered his Piano Concerto No.2 in E minor at the National Theatre in Warsaw. He visited Vienna again in November of same year and played his two piano concertos with great success. After Vienna he continued his concert tour to Munich and Stuttgart. There he learned of the invasion of the Russian Army in Poland, and composed the Etude in C minor, called Revolutionary. Chopin chose the status of a political exile and finally emigrated to Paris, France.
From 1830-1849 Chopin established himself as composer and piano player in Paris. There he changed his name into Frédéric François Chopin. In Paris he met Franz Liszt, who initiated a friendship, and they played together in several concerts, but later became rivals. Chopin formed personal friendship with composer and critic Hector Berlioz. His other personal friends were Felix Mendelssohn and Vincenzo Bellini. In 1835 he made a trip to Dresden and Karlsbad, where he visited with his relatives and accompanied them to Poland. He became seriously ill with bronchial asthma on his way back to Paris. In 1836 he proposed to a seventeen-year-old Polish girl, named Maria Wodzinska, and she accepted. Their engagement lasted for several months, but was called off in 1837 by her mother after a certain manipulative influence by George Sand.
In October of 1836, in Paris Chopin met George Sand at a party hosted by Marie d'Agoult, mistress of Franz Liszt. Initially Chopin commented on Sand: "What an antipathetic woman". In June of 1837 Sand wrote in a letter to her friend about her agenda to abandon another affair in order to start a relationship with Chopin. George Sand was strongly attracted to Chopin, she destroyed his engagement to Maria Wodzinska, and dominated his life for nine years. Chopin and Sand had a turbulent relationship. In 1839, during their first winter vacation together on Mallorca, Sand took along her children from her previous marriage. At Mallorca Chopin did not have a decent piano to practice, while he was composing his 'Raindrop' prelude. Sand witnessed the completion of Chopin's greatest masterpiece, the cycle of 24 Preludes. He had to struggle with a poor rental piano and became unhappy and fell ill, but received little help from local doctors. Later Chopin enjoyed a better environment at Sand's estate in Nohant. There his creativity flourished during the summers of 1839 until 1843. At that time Chopin composed many important works. However, Chopin and Sand were not a good match, and eventually their differences prevailed. Sand was a pipe smoker and a flamboyant party goer. Chopin suffered from bronchial asthma and tuberculosis and needed a quiet solitude for his music. In George Sand's violent quarrel with her daughter Solange, Chopin defended the daughter. Sand left Chopin.
In February of 1848 Chopin gave his last concerts in Paris. He went to England and Scotland in November of 1848, and fell ill there. He gave his last concerts in London while being severely ill. He returned to Paris, but was unable to teach or perform for several months during 1849. Shortly before he died, sensing the end was near, Chopin had requested that Requiem by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart be sung at his funeral service at the Church of the Madeleine. He also requested that his heart be removed and brought in an urn to Warsaw, Poland. Chopin died on October 17, 1849, but could not be buried for two weeks, because the church did not allow female singers for the Mozart's Requiem. At last, the church relented and the funeral was held on October 30, 1849. A crowd of four thousand attended the ceremony. Composer Berlioz, artist Delacroix, poet Adam Mickiewicz, singer Viardot, were present among many others from cultural circles - but notably absent was George Sand. Chopin's heart was dispatched in an urn to Warsaw, and his body was laid to rest in the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, France.- Actress
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Lyubov Orlova was a Russian film star of the 1930s who enjoyed the sympathy of Joseph Stalin.
She was born Lyubov Petrovna Orlova on January 29, 1902 in Zvenigorod, a suburb of Moscow, Russia. Her father, Petr Orlov, was an officer in the Russian Imperial Army, her mother, Evgenia Sukhotina, belonged to Russian Landed Gentry. Through her parents, Orlova was a descendant from the old Russian aristocratic family of Prince Orlov, and was also related to Count Lev Tolstoy, for whom she sang along with the popular Russian basso Feodor Chaliapin Sr. in 1909. From 1919 to 1922 Orlova studied piano and singing at the Moscow Conservatory, but she did not graduate. From 1922-1926, Orlova studied dancing and choreography at the Moscow Theatre College. Then she worked on stage with director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Moscow Musical Theatre of Stanislavsky.
In 1926 Orlova married Andrei Berezin, a prominent Soviet opposition politician. He was arrested in 1930, and was imprisoned for many years; this tragedy caused Orlova a severe depression and she had problems with alcohol. Orlova was seen on stage by many influential people in Moscow. After losing her husband she had other relationships before she met director Grigoriy Aleksandrov. He was looking for an actress to co-star opposite Leonid Utyosov in 'Moscow laughs'. The film became a big success in the 30s Soviet Union. Orlova became Aleksandrov's mistress. Eventually Alrksandrov divorced from his wife and married Orlova, who became the leading star of the Soviet film industry before the Second World War.
Joseph Stalin liked Orlova very much and promoted her to the title of Honorable Actress of Russian Federation in January of 1935. Stalin was probably in a good mood, when he offered Orlova to make her wish come true. She asked about the fate of her first husband. Stalin was surprised. Soon Orlova was called to visit the Lubyanka office of NKVD (KGB). There she was told that her ex-husband is alive in prison and that she may see him, and even join him in his cell. She was scared and humbled and left quietly. Later, in 1949 her ex-husband was diagnosed with cancer, released from prison and died in Lithuania at the home of his mother.
Stalin made Orlova the regular guest at his lavish drinking parties in Moscow. She became addicted to alcohol and was severely criticized by the official paper 'Sovetskoe Iskusstvo' (The Soviet Art). Director Aleksandrov managed to save his wife from her alcohol addiction by threatening to abort her film career. She obeyed and quit drinking. Her films 'Tsirk' (aka.. Circus 1936), 'Volga-Volga' (1938), and 'Svetly Put' (aka.. The Shining Path 1940, aka.. Tanya) were hugely successful. 'Svetly Put' was originally titled 'Cinderella' by the author Viktor Ardov, but Stalin ordered the title to be changed to 'The Shining Path'. Stalin's control over the Soviet film industry was absolute. For her leading roles in 'Volga-Volga' and 'Svetly Put' Orlova was personally awarded by Joseph Stalin with the State Stalin Prize.
At the beginning of the Nazi invasion of Russia during the Second World War, both Orlova and Aleksandrov were filming in Riga, Latvia. They narrowly escaped from the advancing Nazi armies and rushed to Moscow. There Aleksandrov served at the regular night watch during Luftwaffe air raids and bombings. He was severely wounded by a bomb explosion in September of 1941, and suffered from spinal trauma for the rest of his life. In the fall of 1941 Orlova and Aleksandrov were evacuated from Moscow to Baku, Azerbaijan. There they made a film 'Odna Semya' (A Family 1943) which was banned by the Soviet Censorship Committee. The official reason for banning the innocent film was its lacking of propaganda about the fight of the Soviet people against the Nazi invasion.
Orlova was known to be immune from gossips and rumors. She was also known as a faithful wife to Aleksandrov. Though she worked mainly in his films, she also occasionally worked in films made by other directors. She was never allowed by her director-husband Aleksandrov to be kissed in a film, with one exception made for actor Andrey Tutyshkin in 'Volga-Volga'. Her characters were sexy in a way acceptable by the rigid Soviet censorship under Stalin. One scene from the film 'Vstrecha na Elbe' (Meeting on the Elbe 1949) was ordered by Stalin to be deleted, because Stalin criticized the half-naked girls dancing to American Jazz music while celebrating the Victory. However, Stalin kept the uncensored original for himself, and later Stalin showed this scene at his home theatre to Aleksandrov and other guests. Stalin liked the scene, but banned it from being seen by millions of viewers in the Soviet Union.
From 1930 to the end of her life, Orlova has a rare medical problem - she suffered from sensitivity to daylight, which she developed after the stressful arrest of her first husband. She also suffered from severe insomnia and depended on various medications. She was spending much time at her home behind shielded windows. Her later work with Aleksandrov, such as in 'Russki suvenir' (Russian Souvenir 1960) was a flop. Her last stage performance was in Leningrad, in 1963, after that she was not seen on stage. Her last film with Aleksandrov, 'Skvorets i Lira' (1973), was not released upon Orlova's insistence, because she was shocked with her own looks in the film.
Lyubov Orlova was the first Russian film star to use plastic surgeries in her later years. At that time she refused to be photographed, and was hiding from public. She died of pancreatic cancer on January 26, 1975, and three days later, on her 73rd birthday, she was laid to rest in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, Russia.- Producer
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Born in Russian Empire in 1904, Lewton moved with his mother and sister to Berlin in 1906, then to USA in 1909. He wrote for newspapers, magazines, novels, pornography, etc.- often using pseudonyms to disguise their origin (the name Val Lewton was one such pseudonym, used first for some novels in the 1930's, then revived later in his career to take writing credit for two movies). In 1933, he got a job with David O. Selznick where he spent many years as a story editor and jack-of-all-trades. Then in 1942, RKO hired him to head their new horror unit, where he made many famous and well-respected B-movies, for very low costs and high profits. In 1946, he "graduated" to A-movies, but increasing health problems, trouble working with big-money Hollywood, and other factors combined to force him to produce only three more movies before his death in 1951.- Michael Chekhov was a Russian actor in the Moscow Art Theatre who emigrated to America and made a career in Hollywood, earning himself an Oscar nomination.
He was born Mikhail Aleksandrovich Chekhov in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1891. His mother, Natalya Golden, was Jewish, and his father, Aleksandr Chekhov, was a brother of writer Anton Chekhov. Anton wrote of his four-year-old nephew in 1895, "I believe that he has a growing talent." From 1907-11 he studied classic drama and comedy at Suvorin Theater School in St. Petersburg, graduating with honors as actor. In St. Petersburg he met Konstantin Stanislavski who invited him to join the Moscow Art Theater. The two became good friends and partners in propelling the Moscow Art Theater to international fame. Later Stanislavsky wrote that Michael Chekhov was a genius.
His film career began in 1913 with a role in 'Tryokhsotletie tsarstvovaniya doma Romanovykh (1913)' (aka Tercentenary of the Romanov Dynasty), followed by a few more roles in Russian silent films. It was during the Russian Revolution of 1917 that his beloved first wife, Olga Tschechowa, divorced him. He was devastated and suffered from depression and alcoholism for the rest of his life.
Between 1922 and 1928 he led the second Moscow Art Theater, earning himself a reputation as teacher, actor and director who brought innovations experimenting with symbolism and acmeist poetry. Chekhov updated the Stanislavsky's acting method, by blending it with yoga, theosophy, psychology and physiology, and adding his own ideas of transformation of actor's consciousness through psychological gesture and movement techniques for entering a special state of subconscious creativity. His idea of using an actor's own intuition and creative imagination was a departure from the original method of his teacher, Stanislavsky.
Chekhov ignored the communist regime and was attacked by the Soviets for joining the Anthroposophic Society. In 1928 he was fired from the Moscow Art Theatre and eventually left Russia. In Europe, he taught his acting method and also made a big success in German films, co-starring with his ex-wife Olga Tschechowa, who was then living in Germany with her second husband. In 1931 he founded the Chekhov Theatre, with support from Rachmaninov, Bohner and Morgenstern, and in 1935 he brought the Chekhov Theatre on tour to New York. He taught acting in France, Austria, Latvia, Lithuania, and in England before WWII. In 1938 he moved to the United States, where he started his own school, and also successfully directed Dostoyevsky's "Demons" on Broadway. Then he was introduced to Hollywood by Sergei Rachmaninoff.
In 1945 Chekhov played his best known film role, psychiatrist Brulov in Spellbound (1945). He received an Academy Award nomination for the role and became a member of the American Film Academy in 1946. At that time, he taught his acting method in Hollywood. In 1953 he published a book about his method, "To The Actor", with preface written by Yul Brynner. His students included Gregory Peck, Marilyn Monroe, Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman, Anthony Quinn, Jack Palance, Feodor Chaliapin Jr., Elia Kazan, Clint Eastwood, Yul Brynner and many other Hollywood actors and directors.
At the end of his life Chekhov reunited with his daughter Ada Tschechowa in California. He died in 1955 in Beverly Hills, and was laid to rest in the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles. - Aleksandr Benyaminov was born on 4 June 1904 in Grozny, Russian Empire. He was an actor, known for Moscow on the Hudson (1984), God 19-yy (1938) and Muzhestvo (1939). He died on 22 March 1991 in New York, USA.
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Dmitri Shostakovich, one of Russian culture's most acclaimed intellectuals who was censored under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, was an internationally recognized composer whose music was in over 100 films.
He was born Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich on September 25, 1906, in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was the second of three children of Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich, a chemical engineer, and Sofia Kokaoulina, a pianist. Young Shostakovich studied piano under his mother tutelage and at a private school in St. Petersburg. His greatest influences were Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven and Modest Mussorgsky. From 1919-1925 he studied piano and composition at St. Petersburg (Leningrad) Conservatory. He wrote his First "Classical" symphony as his graduation piece. In 1927 he won an "honorable mention diploma" at the 1st International Piano Competition in Warsaw. In 1929 he collaborated with writer Vladimir Mayakovsky, artist Alexander Rodchenko and director Vsevolod Meyerhold.
In 1934 Shostakovich collaborated with Aleksei Dikij on the legendary opera Katerina Izmailova" (aka Lady Makbeth of Mtsensk). Dikij's production of "Katerina Izmailova" had over 100 performances in Leningrad and Moscow, and was considered a highlight in his directing career. However, in 1936, the opera was severely criticized by some critics on the Pravda, the Communist Party's official newspaper, and accused of formalism and intellectualism.
In the summer of 1941 Nazi Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union, and German and Finnish forces and encircled Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Defenders and civilians in besieged Leningrad were doomed, because the besieging forces cut supplies of food and energy to the surrounded city. It wasn't long before the city's population of birds, pets and even rats were eaten, and not long after there were reports of cannibalism brought about by starvation. The siege of Leningrad was so impenetrable that by December of that year an average of 4000 to 6000 residents a day were dying of starvation, disease, shellfire, bombardment and a variety of other causes.
During the first months of the siege Shostakovich was in Leningrad. He survived the first bombardments and joined the "night watch" patrol, helping to put out fires during massive German air bombardments. Shostakovich personally neutralized several incendiary bombs and was actively involved in firefighting. After aerial and artillery bombardments, during the rare quiet moments, Shostakovich was back to his piano composing new music. He was evacuated from the besieged city in the end of 1941.
The Seventh "Leningrad" Symphony, which Shostakovich started composing during the Nazi aerial and artillery attacks during the siege, was the masterpiece that won him national and international recognition. His music helped lift the spirits of Leningrad citizens in a time when they were struggling to survive.
On August 9, 1942, Karl Eliasberg gave a premiere performance of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony in Leningrad. That famous concert was made possible because Eliasberg specially created an orchestra of survivors who were still able to perform in spite of starvation and dystrophy.
Eliasberg, who was also extremely emaciated, spent some time in the hospital in the Astoria hotel and came to the rehearsals straight from the sick ward. On the score of one of the musicians of that legendary orchestra you can still see a drawing showing hollow-cheeked Eliasberg conducting his orchestra sitting on a chair. The legendary performance was broadcast live from the Radio Hall in Leningrad, so millions of civilians and defenders of the besieged city were able to hear the powerful music. The symphony written in the conventional four movements is Shostakovich's longest, and one of the longest in the repertoire, with performances taking approximately one hour and fifteen minutes. The scale and scope of the work is consistent with Shostakovich's other symphonies as well as with those of composers considered to be his strongest influences, including Bruckner, Gustav Mahler and Igor Stravinsky.
Before they tackled Shostakovich's work, Eliasberg had the players go through pieces from the standard repertoire - Ludwig van Beethoven, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov - which they also performed for broadcast. Because the city was still blockaded at the time, the score was flown by night in early July for rehearsal. The concert was given on 9 August 1942. Whether this date was chosen intentionally, it was the day Hitler had chosen previously to celebrate the fall of Leningrad with a lavish reception for the top Nazi commanders. But instead of Hitler's plan, all loudspeakers delivered the live broadcast of the symphony performance throughout the city as well as to the German forces in a move of psychological warfare. The Russian commander of the Leningrad front, General Govorov, ordered a bombardment of German artillery positions in advance of the broadcast to ensure their silence during the performance of the symphony; a special operation, code-named "Squall," was executed for precisely this purpose. Three thousand high-caliber shells were lobbed onto the enemy. Then the music of Shostakovich came out of the speakers all over the siege perimeter, so the Nazis had to face the music. The music of Shostakovich brought the much needed support and catharsis to survivors who loved the symphony and applauded to Eliasberg and his orchestra. General Govorov with his staff came backstage to thank Eliasberg and his musicians for their art and courage.
The news about Dmitry Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony premiere in besieged Leningrad spread all over the world. It was an important message to all nations that Hitler's attack on Leningrad failed. Shostakovich who began to write his famous symphony before evacuation from besieged Leningrad in 1941, could not go back to attend its premier performance in 1942. The composer sent the conductor and the musicians who performed his work in the besieged city a telegram with words of gratitude.
After WWII Shostakovich was again accused of formalism in 1948. At that time, Shostakovich gained international recognition in the free world, and received several invitations to participate in music festivals and other cultural events. He was awarded the International Peace Prize (1954), State Prize five times (in 1941-1952), State Prizes of Russia and the USSR, and was designated People's Artist of the USSR. From 1957-1975 he was secretary of the Union of Composers of Russia and the USSR. He taught and promoted many talented musicians, such as Andrey Petrov, Georgi Sviridov, Karen Khachaturyan, and Boris Tishchenko among others.
Shostakovich and Yevgeniy Yevtushenko worked together on the famous Symphony No. 13 titled "Babi Yar", a vocal setting of poems by Yevtushenko. It was first performed in Moscow on December 18, 1962 under the baton of Kirill Kondrashin. Yevtushenko and Shostakovich toured many countries with the performances of "Babi Yar", and made several recordings of the Symphony No. 13. Among Shostakovich's best known film scores are 'Suite from The Gadfly' from The Gadfly (1955), and the score for director Grigoriy Kozintsev's acclaimed film Hamlet (1964) starring Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy.
In 1965 Shostakovich raised his voice in defense of poet Joseph Brodsky, who was sentenced to five years of exile and hard labor. Shostakovich co-signed protests together with such prominent figures as Korney Ivanovich Chukovskiy, Anna Akhmatova, Samuil Marshak, Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, and the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. After the protests his sentence was commuted, and Brodsky returned to Leningrad. At that time, Shostakovich joined the group of 25 distinguished intellectuals in signing the letter to Leonid Brezhnev asking not to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin.
Dmitri Shostakovich was a towering figure in Russian music of the 20th century along with 'Sergei Prokofiev (I)' and Aram Khachaturyan. He wrote 15 symphonies, of which the Fifth (1937), the Sevenths "Leningrad" (1942), and the Thurteenth "Baby Yar" (1968) are the best known. His other compositions include cantatas and oratorios, seven operas and operettas, four ballets, twelve musical comedies and other music for stage plays, 36 original motion picture scores, fifteen quartets and other chamber music for, piano, violin, and cello. Shostakovich, who was an awarded pianist himself, had composed outstanding works for piano, such as his Piano concertos No1 and No2. His 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano received numerous awards and recognitions, and were recorded in critically acclaimed performance by Vladimir Ashkenazy.
Shostakovich died of a heart attack on august 9, 1975, in Moscow, and was laid to rest in Novodevichi Convent Cemetery in Moscow, Russia. His legacy is continued by his son, conductor Maxim Shostakovich, and his grandson, pianist Dmitri Shostakovich Jr.- Additional Crew
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Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April 1870 - 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Leninism.- Czar Nicholas II of Russia was crowned in 1894, and was the last Emperor of Russia. He was born on 19 May, 1868, the first child of Tsarevitch Aleksandr III and his wife, Maria Fyodorovna. He was christened His Imperial Highness Nicholas Aleksandrovitch Romanov, Grand Duke of Russia. He was followed by three brothers and two sisters: Grand Duke Aleksandr (1869-1870), Grand Duke Georgy (1871-1899) Grand Duchess Ksenia (1875-1960), Grand Duke Michael (1878-19180 and Grand Duchess Olga (1882-1960). He was related to the Danish, British and German royal families. As a child, Nicholas wasn't quite as bright as his younger brothers, resulting in his father's belief that Nicholas, a somewhat shy and sensitive child, wasn't "man enough" to be Emperor of Russia, and he often derisively referred to his son as a girl. His father had already picked out a French princess to be Nicholas' wife, in order to cement relations with the French. Unfortunately for him, however, he further alienated his father when he fell in love with a German princess, Alix (aka Alexandra), and decided to marry her instead. Although dead set against this marriage, his father finally gave his reluctant blessing only on his deathbed, when he realized that if Nicholas were not allowed to marry Alix he would marry no one, thus placing the continuation of the Romanov dynasty in danger). In November of 1894, he married Her Ducal Highness Princess Alix Victoria Helena Louise Beatrice of Hesse-Darstadt and By Rhine. They had five children: Grand Duchess Olga (b. 1895-1918), Grand Duchess Tatiana (b. 1897-1918), Grand Duchess Maria (b. 1899-1918), Grand Duchess Anastasia (b. 1901-1918) and Tsarevitch Aleksey (1904-1918).
Upon his ascension as the emperor of Russsia in 1894, he was given the following title: His Highness the Tsar Nicholas Aleksandrovitch Romanov, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias, Tsar of Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod, Kazan, Astrakhan, of Poland, of Siberia, of Tauric Chersonese, of Georgia, Lord of Pskov, Grand Duke of Smolensk, of Lithuania, Volhynia, Podolia and Finland, Prince of Estonia, Livonia, Courland and Semigalia, Samogotia, Bialostock, Karelia, Tver, Yougouria, Perm, Viatka, Bulgaria, and other countries; Lord and Grand Duke of Lower Novgorod, of Tchernigov, Riazan, Polotsk, Rostov, Yaroslav, Belozero, Oudoria, Obdoria, Condia, Vitebsk, Mstislav and, all the region of the North, Lord and Sovereign of the countries of Iveria, Cartalinia, Kabardinia and the provinces of Armenia, Sovereign of the Circassian Princes and the Mountain Princes, Lord of Turkestan, Heir of Norway, Duke of Schleswig Holstein, of Storman, of the Ditmars, and of Oldenbourg.
After Nicholas became Czar, he determined to travel and see as much of the world outside of Russia as he could. However, in an ominous portent of things to come, during a tour of Japan an assassin rushed at him with a large sword, and Nicholas barely escaped with his life, although the would-be assassin managed to inflict a large gash on his forehead. In what can be seen as yet another bad omen, during his coronation a stampede occurred on a field near the scene when free food was being given out to the large crowds, and more than 1000 people died. In 1905 relations between Russia and Japan had deteriorated to a dangerous point, and there was talk of war. Nicholas was in fact in favor of a negotiated settlement and talks resulted in a compromise being offered by the Japanese, but Nicholas' advisers and generals persuaded him to reject the Japanese offer and declare war, which they were confident they would win handily. As it turned out, however, the ensuing Russo-Japanese War of 1905 was a devastating defeat for Russia, which lost much of its navy to the better trained, better equipped and better led Japanese forces, tens of thousands of its soldiers and large swaths of its territory.
The defeat caused even more discontent in the country, which had been building for quite some time among peasants, workers, students and an increasing number of members of the armed forces. In 1905 a crowd of demonstrators marched on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to present a petition to Nicholas asking for liberalization and reform. Although the demonstration was peaceful at first - Nicholas himself saw no danger in the situation and had in fact departed to his country estate for the weekend - things rapidly deteriorated, and before anyone could really figure out what happened, the troops surrounding the palace opened fire on the demonstrators (many of whom were carrying pictures and placards of Nicholas as proof of their devotion to him), killing many of them. Although it's believed now that Nicholas did not give orders for the soldiers to fire on the crowd, many Russians at the time believed that he had, and this began to solidify opposition to the monarchy's rule. The resulting political and domestic pressure forced Nicholas to convene the Duma, the Russian parliament, in August of 1905.
He then issued what was called the October Manifesto in which he promised to introduce basic civil liberties to the Russian populace, make the Duma more than just a rubber-stamp for the Czar--which many believed, rightly or wrongly, that it was--and give it legislative and oversight authority. Although relations between Nicholas and the Duma were at first good, they quickly deteriorated because Empress Alexandra did not like or trust its leadership. Nicholas wound up dissolving the Duma, adding fuel to the fires of revolution already building up in the country. As if Nicholas' political problems weren't enough, his son Alexei, who was born in 1904, turned out to have hemophilia, a disease which prevents blood from clotting properly. At that time it was tantamount to a death sentence, as no treatment for it existed. Alexandra, desperate for anything that might save her son's life, turned to a sinister mystic and "healer" from Siberia named Grigory Rasputin. Rasputin did seem to have a calming effect on the child, whose health appeared to improve, thus solidifying Rasputin's hold on the royal family (many at the time suspected that Rasputin was secretly hypnotizing the boy into believing that he was better, in order to strengthen his hold over the Empress). The Empress became totally dependent on Rasputin, and eventually came to believe that he and God were in direct contact about her son. Rasputin was assassinated in 1916 by a group of disgruntled Russian noblemen worried about his hold on the royal family (not to mention their own future at the court). In 1914 the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a member of "Young Bosnia", a fanatical Serbian nationalist secret society. It wasn't long before events snowballed and Europe was plunged into World War I. Russia entered the war on the side of the Allies against Germany and Austria-Hungary. At first Russian forces had considerable success against the German and Austrian armies and their Turkish allies on the Eastern front, but the fighting eventually turned into a combination of trench warfare and huge artillery barrages.
Through a combination of bad weather, poor logistics, low morale and staggeringly inept leadership, the Russian armies soon began incurring defeat after defeat and suffering huge losses (the Battle of Tannenberg alone cost them more than 100,000 dead). In 1915 Russia lost Poland to the Germans, and Nicholas himself decided to take over as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Since he was now personally prosecuting the war, domestic policy was basically left up to Empress Alexandra, who was not popular with the Russian people, especially since she herself was German. Political opposition to the regime increased. Unfortunately, Nicholas' military leadership was almost as inept as his generals', resulting in more defeats and even larger casualties for the Russian armies. The country was now being convulsed by strikes and riots, and many military units were mutinying and joining with revolutionary forces to take over cities from Nicholas' government. By March of 1917 popular opposition to the monarchy was so strong that Nicholas was forced to abdicate. Three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty came to an end. Aleksandr Kerensky, a former schoolmate of Vladimir Lenin, became the leader of the provisional government, which detained the Romanov family under house arrest at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, a suburb of St. Petersburg. They were then transported to Siberia in August of 1917. By November of 1917, with the Russian military being torn apart by mutinies and revolts, the Bolsheviks ousted the provisional government to become the rulers of Russia. They took custody of the Romanov family and moved them to the city of Ekaterinburg. Lenin and his colleague Yakov Sverdlov urged the murder of the Czar and his family in order to shore up support for the Bolsheviks among the masses.
At 2:30 on the morning of July 17, 1918, a firing squad shot Czar Nicholas, his wife Empress Alexandra, their five children, their doctor and their personal assistants and royal secretaries. As proof of their death and to dispel stories that the royal family had managed to escape, parts of their bodies and some of the royal necklaces and jewelry were delivered to the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow, although rumors persisted for years afterward that some of the family did in fact manage to bribe their would-be executioners and escape. - Composer
- Music Department
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Wladyslaw Szpilman was born in 1911 in Sosnowiec. On leaving school, he went to Warsaw to study music (piano) in the Chopin School of Music, under Professor Jozef Smidowicz, and later, under Professor Aleksander Michalowski (both scholars of Franz List). In 1931 he went to Berlin to the Academy of Music studying under Professor Leonid Kreutzer and Arthur Schnabel (piano) and Professor Franz Schreker (composition). At this time he wrote his Violin Concerto, Piano Suite "Zycie Maszyn" (The Life of Machines), Concertino for piano with Orchestra, many works for piano and violin and also some songs. In 1935 Szpilman entered the Polish Radio, where, except during the war, he worked until 1963. In 1946, he published his book "Death of a City" - memories from 1939 to 1945. Since 1945, Szpilman has appeared in concerts as a soloist and with chamber groups in Poland, throughout Europe and in America. He and Bronislav Gimpel formed a very successful piano duet in 1932, which grew in 1962 to the Warsaw Piano Quintet, that performed about 2,500 concerts until 1987 worldwide, with the exception of Australia. In 1936 he also started his career as a composer of songs (about 500). About 150 of them were in Poland's pop charts and they are "evergreens" of Polish pop music culture to this day. In the 50s he wrote also about 40 songs for children, for which he received in 1955 the award of the Polish Composers Union. He also wrote many orchestral pieces (ballet, Small Overture, etc.), musicals, music for children's theater and music for about 50 children's radio broadcasts, as well as film music: "Wrzos" (1937); "Dr. Murek" (1939); "Pokoj Zwyciezy Swiat" (1950); "Call My Wife" (1957), and others. In 1961, he initiated and organized the Sopot International Song Festival in Poland, and also founded the Polish Union of Authors of Popular Music. In 1964, he became a member of Presidium of Polish Composers Union, and ZAIKS (Polish ASCAP). In April 1998, his book "Death of the City" will be published by ECON Verlag, a leading German publisher, with commentary by a famous German writer and poet: Wolf Biermann.- Director
- Writer
- Editor
Dziga Vertov was born on 2 January 1896 in Bialystok, Grodno Governorate, Russian Empire [now Podlaskie, Poland]. He was a director and writer, known for Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Three Songs About Lenin (1934) and The Sixth Part of the World (1926). He was married to Elizaveta Svilova. He died on 12 February 1954 in Moscow, RSFSR, USSR [now Russia].- Kola Kwariani was born on 16 January 1903 in Kutaisi, Georgia, Russian Empire (now Georgia). He was an actor, known for The Killing (1956), Titin des Martigues (1938) and On demande une brute (1934). He was married to Sidonia. He died in February 1980 in New York City, New York, USA.
- Zvee Scooler was born on 1 December 1899 in Kamenets-Podolsky, Russian Empire [now Kamianets-Podilskyi, Khmelnytskyi Oblast, Ukraine]. He was an actor, known for Fiddler on the Roof (1971), Love and Death (1975) and Uncle Moses (1932). He was married to Lillian Friedman. He died on 25 March 1985 in New York City, New York, USA.