Alla Nazimova was a Russian actress who immigrated to the United States in 1905. On Broadway, she was noted for her work in the classic plays of Ibsen, Chekhov and Turgenev. Her efforts at silent film production were less successful, but a few sound-film performances survive as a record of her art.
Background
Alla Nazimova was born on June 4, 1878 in Yalta, Russia. According to family sources, she was the second daughter and youngest of three children of Jacob Leventon, a pharmacist, and Sophia (Harvit) Leventon. Both parents came of Jewish stock but had joined the Russian Orthodox Church.
Education
As a small child, Alla was taken to Switzerland to be educated with her brother and sister. There they lived a Spartan existence in the care of a peasant family near Zurich. Returning to Russia when she was twelve, Alla enrolled at a high school in Odessa and seriously considered a career as a violinist. Her interest turned, however, to the theatre, and at seventeen she entered the dramatic school of the Philharmonic Society of Moscow, where she received three years of training under the leadership of the influential director and playwright Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko.
Career
In 1898, Alla and most of her classmates were taken into the Moscow Art Theatre, newly founded by Nemirovich-Danchenko and Konstantin Stanislavski. Here she studied Stanislavski's techniques of training the actor to build a character internally as well as externally.
To gain experience in leading roles and to enlarge her repertoire, Alla left the Moscow Art Theatre to spend several rigorous seasons with provincial troupes in Kislovodsk, Kostroma, and Vilna. In 1903-04 she acted at a "theatre for working people" in St. Petersburg, where she appeared with the actor-director Paul Orlenev in a performance of Ibsen's Ghosts. Orlenev had somehow been able to obtain the censor's approval for the Ibsen production but found himself unable to gain permission to do a pro-Jewish play, The Chosen People, by Evgeni Chirikov. He decided to offer the play outside Russia, and organized a company which included Nazimova in one of the leading roles. They appeared in Berlin, London, and finally New York. The Chosen People (played in Russian) opened at the Herald Square Theatre on March 23, 1905. The critics were favorable despite the language barrier, and they particularly praised Nazimova. Since the improvident Orlenev had made no long-term arrangements for a theatre, financial difficulties ensued, and the group was forced to move to a small, wretched building on the Lower East Side which also housed a dance hall and a barroom. There he offered a repertoire of plays seldom or never seen in New York: plays by Chekhov, Strindberg, Hauptmann, and Ibsen.
Nazimova put all her theatrical resources to work, sewing costumes, translating scripts, composing incidental music, and directing many of the productions. The intensity of her dedication to her art was unusual in the American theatre of that time. Though the company's audiences were composed mainly of Russian immigrant Jews, New York theatrical, literary, and even society figures also found their way to this theatre in the ghetto. When the venture failed, Orlenev returned to Russia, but Nazimova remained in New York and was signed by the Shuberts to make her English-speaking debut.
After learning English over the summer, she appeared as Hedda in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler at the Princess Theatre on November 13, 1906. The actor-producer Henry Miller was nominally in charge, but the diminutive actress, with shining black hair and luminous blue eyes, directed her own debut. The critics were enthusiastic, but it was not until two months later, when she played Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House, that the full impact of Nazimova's particular kind of acting became evident. Here was an actress who did not possess a fixed and immutable stage personality, but who could, by free and expressive use of her body, portray the unique inner motivations of different individuals. Although the Shuberts gave her other Ibsen roles--Hilda Wangel in The Master Builder (September 1907) and Rita Allmers in Little Eyolf (April 1910)--these were combined with inconsequential box-office plays; she had become a theatrical "property. " She signed next with Charles Frohman, but he did nothing more than provide her with a popular but third-rate vehicle called Bella Donna (1912), casting her as a "bizarre, temperamental, exotic" woman. Identification with this type of character dogged much of her later career. In 1915 Nazimova, for lack of better opportunities, toured the vaudeville circuit in the short pacifist play War Brides. The film version the next year, altered to become a piece of anti-German propaganda, served to launch her as a screen star, and she appeared in such silent classics as Revelation (1918) and Salomé (1922), the latter an "artistic" film with mise-en-scène inspired by Aubrey Beardsley drawings. Again the exotic was stressed, making Nazimova a prototype for the strange, passionate women who added a foreign allure to the more common "vamp" of the silent screen.
For several years, aided by an intensive publicity campaign, she had a wide popular following, and her salary reached $13, 000 a week. But her popularity presently declined, and her insistence upon quality in the production of her films made them so expensive that she was forced to finance them herself. She lost what money she had made, and in 1925 she left Hollywood, to remain away for almost two decades.
Nazimova had not deserted the stage completely during the years in California: in 1918 she played a series of Ibsen dramas for the producer Arthur Hopkins, and in 1923 the title role in Dagmar. She joined Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre in New York in 1928--the year after she became an American citizen--and that October gave a memorable performance as Madame Ranevsky in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. In 1930 Nazimova joined the Theatre Guild.
Nazimova returned to Hollywood, playing character roles in such films as Escape (1940), Blood and Sand (1941), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944), and Since You Went Away (1944).
She died of a heart attack in 1945 in the Good Samaritan Hospital in Hollywood. Her ashes were placed in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California.
Nazimova's enduring fame rests with her more than forty-year career on the American stage. In the early 1900's, when theatre in the United States had become more and more a matter of "giving the public what it wants, " she convinced audiences that there was more to acting than posturing and declamation. She was not a technical actress. Although she did little teaching, Nazimova's influence upon the art of acting was considerable.
Achievements
Personality
Her dedication may have wavered in the face of the money, luxury, and stardom which were thrust upon her, but she was never completely false to the ideals and aims of her younger days. In an age when many actors took pride in their unvarying performances, she said that she never really knew how a particular character would behave on a particular night until she had spoken the first line. Companies would watch from backstage, fascinated by the ever-changing nuances with which she imbued her scenes.
Quotes from others about the person
"Alla Nazimova's Christine is superbly sinister, possessed of an insidious and electric malevolence, and brilliant with an incandescent fire. " (John Mason Brown)
"I think of all actors she was, certainly to my generation of apprentices, the most intensely studied and admired. "
Connections
At twenty she was married to a fellow student, Sergei Golovin, but they soon separated. In 1913 she was reported to have married the actor Charles Bryant; in fact they never married, and they separated in 1925.