Background
Richard Boleslavsky was born on 4 February 1889 in Warsaw.
Richard Boleslavsky was born on 4 February 1889 in Warsaw.
For ten years before the First World War, Boleslavsky was an actor at the Moscow Arts Theatre; indeed, he was later to write books on Stanislavsky’s teachings. He had acted in Russian films before he began to direct. During the Civil War he fought for the Poles and made a film about the war for them.
He went to Germany and acted in Die Gezeichneten (22, Carl Dreyer) before going to America to direct on Broadway. His first work in the American cinema was directing the musical numbers in The Grand Parade (30. Fred Newmeyer). He directed a few films for Columbia and RKO and was then called to MGM to conduct all three Barrymores in Rasputin and the Empress, the source of a major court case involving Prince Yusapov.
Stanislavsky’s method is hardly evident in Boleslavsky’s most characteristic work, in which melodramas, romance, and costume pieces predominate: The Painted Veil is Somerset Maughams novel with Garbo and Herbert Marshall; Clive of India was Ronald Colman; Les Miserables is the best version ol Hugo’s novel, with Fredric March and Charles Laughton confronting each other; but most memorable is the folly de Selznick of The Garden of Allah, with Dietrich and Charles Boyer, and the comedy of Theodora Goes Wild, which probably owes a lot to writer Sidney Buehman and to Mary McCarthy’s original story.