Background
Maria Ouspenskaya was born on 29 July 1876 in Tula, Russian Federation.
Мария Алексеевна Успенская
Maria Ouspenskaya was born on 29 July 1876 in Tula, Russian Federation.
She studied singing in Warsaw, Poland, and acting in Moscow.
There had been no Maria Ouspenskaya, Hollywood would have had to invent one. For half a dozen years she was indispensable to any big-budget movie that required a shriveled old lady with an autocratic air and a strong accent. To the industry she was the goods, given her background with Stanislavsky and her successes on Broadwav after she turned up in America, in 1923, on a Moscow Art Theatre tour, and stayed.
Her first Hollywood movie was Wylers wonderful Dodsworth (1936), in which she is an Austrian baroness, laying dowm the law to poor aging Ruth Chatterton. (It was a role she had done on stage.) As further proof of tier nobility, she was a countess in the Garbo-Boyer Conquest (37, Clarence Brown) and a maharani in The Rains Came (39, Brown), even a queen (though onlv an Amazon queen) in Tarzan and the Amazons (45, Kurt Neumann). But mostly she was a madame: Madame Olga Kirowa (her best role, Vivien Leigh’s stern ballet mistress) in the 1940 Waterloo Bridge (Mervyn LeRoy); Madame Lvdia Basilova in Dance, Girl, Dance (40, Dorothy Arzner); Madame Tanya in Beyond Tomorrow (40, A. Edward Sutherland); Madame Cecile Roget in The Mystery of Marie Roget (42, Phil Rosen); Madame von Eln in King's Row (42, Sam Wood); Madame Goronoff in I've Always Loved You (46, Frank Borzase); Madame Karina in her last film, A Kiss in the Dark (49, Delmer Daves).
Quotes from others about the person
Lee Strasberg was one of her students. In his biography of Alla Nazimova—a rival for many roles—Gavin Lambert tells us that Ouspenskaya “was a formidable presence who entered the classroom wearing a monocle and earning a pitcher of what looked like water but was in fact gin. Her opening line to the class, delivered without a smile, became famous: Make for me friendly atmosphere, please. One student reported that she would tell us to imagine we were blades of grass on the oceanbed. And everyone swayed.”