Alla nazimova autobiography

All but forgotten today, Alla Nazimova (1879–1945) was one of the most powerful actresses in silent-era Hollywood, able to name her terms and maintain artistic control of her films. Lambert's rich, readable, painstakingly researched biography follows Nazimova's life from her difficult, Dostoyevskian childhood in Russia, where she suffered at the hands of an abusive, neglectful father, through her years studying with Stanislavsky et al. at the Moscow Art Theater, to her emigration to the U.S. and subsequent rise to the heights of the film and theater worlds. Lambert handles a melodramatic life full of violence, scandal, and the kind of sudden reversals of fortune that would have killed lesser talents with considerable aplomb, and Nazimova's sexual orientation with even greater composure, treating her bisexual inclinations and later strict lesbianism without a hint of Hollywood-Babylonish sensationalism. Incidentally noteworthy are the fascinating portraits Lambert provides of the Moscow Art Theater in its first years, of Hollywood in the Roaring Twenties, and of the Amer

•

Nazimova: A Biography

A major rediscovery - a full-scale biography - of the electrifying Russian-born actress who brought Stanislavksy and Chekhov to American theatre, who was applauded, lionized, adored - a legend of the stage and screen for forty years, and then strangely forgotten. Her shockingly natural approach to acting transformed the theatre of her day. She thrilled Laurette Taylor. The first time Tennessee Williams saw her he knew he wanted to be a playwright ("She was so shatteringly powerful that I couldn't stay in my seat"). Eugene O'Neill said of her that she gave him his "first conception of a modern theatre". She introduced the American stage and its audience to Ibsen's New Woman, a woman hell-bent on independence. It was a role Nazimova embodied offstage as well. When she toured in a repertory of A Doll's House, The Master Builder, and Hedda Gabler from 1907 to 1910, she earned the then unheard-of sum of five million dollars for theatre manager Lee Shubert. Eight years later she went to Hollywood and signed a contract with Metro Pictures (before it was MGM) an

•

Alla Nazimova

by Jennifer Horne

Alla Nazimova’s silent film career began in 1916 with her performance as the feisty, indomitable lead character in the screen adaptation of Marion Craig Wentworth’s pacifist drama “War Brides.” Nazimova had performed the role as a one-act play on the vaudeville circuit in an effort to reverse course on the succession of exoticized femme fatale roles that she had accepted under contract first to New York’s Shubert brothers and then to Charles Frohman’s Theatrical Syndicate. The tour production of “War Brides” for the variety stage had been popular and well received, particularly by women’s organizations, presumably just the encouragement independent producer Lewis J. Selznick needed to make his highly profitable film version under the direction of Herbert Brenon. Prior to this performance, Nazimova had a reputation as a moody Bohemian and political subversive. (Emma Goldman once served as her press agent and companion.) With her role in War Brides, a strident feminist was invented, if only temporarily, for the screen. Nazimova boasted to a rep