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Archive for May, 2009

16 May

Pola Negri, born as Apolonia Chalupec on 31 December 1894 (or 1897) in Lipno, Poland, became one of Hollywood’s most famous silent film stars. When she was a child her father was arrested by the Russian army and sent to a Siberian gulag. As a result her mother moved to Warsaw where Pola was accepted into the Imperial Ballet. Her promising career was cut short by tuberculosis and, with the help of her mother’s childhood friend, she was accepted into the Warsaw Imperial Academy of Dramatic Arts. She debuted as Hedwig in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck and moved to the national theatre of Poland.

World War I interrupted her rise and she and her mother were again cast into poverty. She resumed acting after the war and was discovered by film director Ernst Lubitsch with whom she made many successful movies in Germany. Adolf Hitler was so mesmerized by her that he personally countermanded an order forbidding her to work in Germany because she was supposedly partly Jewish (she later won a 10,000 franc judgment against a French newspaper which claimed that she had an affair with Hitler).

Her film with Lubitsh, Madame du Barry, was released in the U.S. as Passion and it made them both immediate stars. They moved to Hollywood where she appeared in a string of successful movies and was known as a great rival to Gloria Swanson, who eventually married the Marquis Le Bailly de la Falaise de la Coudraye (1898-1972) (Swanson and Negri once had a cat fight with real cats).

Negri married and divorced a Polish nobleman, Count Eugene Dambski. She became the mistress and fiancee’ of Charlie Chaplin but broke her relationship with him in a verbal spat which was assiduously reported. As she later claimed, “A great deal has been written about my relationship with Charlie Chaplin. Unfortunately, much of it has been written by Mr. Chaplin. Still less fortunately, what he wrote was largely untrue. Rather than say he behaved in less than a gentlemanly fashion, I would prefer to excuse him on the grounds that all clowns live in a world of fantasy.”

At the death of her former lover Rudolph Valentino (who said of himself in 1923,“Women are not in love with me but with the picture of me on the screen. I am merely the canvas on which women paint their dreams.”), Negri rushed out of a film location to throw herself, heavily veiled in black and supported by bodyguards, onto Valentino’s coffin. She brought his body back to Los Angeles from New York City with train stops along the way for his fans to pay homage. The public was unimpressed and her popularity began to wane.

She was not forgiven when, in 1927, less than a year after Valentino’s death, she married Prince Serge Mdivani (whose brother, David, married film star Mae Murray) and took him to live in her chateau in France. They divorced in a highly public proceeding at The Hague in November 1932 after she lost the bulk of her fortune which was estimated in 1929 to be $5 million. She claimed that his mishandling of her financial affairs ultimately ruined her.

Prince Serge then married wealthy opera singer Mary McCormic who was known as the “baby diva” and went through her money as well. Pola Negri returned to Europe for a while then back to the U.S. to make her talking-picture debut in A Woman Commands. When it was not successful, she returned to Europe and remained there until the increasing Nazi domination caused her to leave in 1940 for the U.S. where she finally retired from films in 1964.

She lived for a while in one room in a small hotel in New York City and was forced to sell her jewels in order to survive. She then recovered some of her European property and moved to San Antonio, Texas, in 1957. She lived forgotten there with a female companion, Margaret West, until her death. She wrote Memoirs of a Star in 1970, but never regained her position or her money and suffered a brain tumor which she declined to have treated. She lived two additional years and died of pneumonia at San Antonio’s Baptist Hospital 2 August 1987 and was buried in Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles. She left most of her estate, including rare prints of her early films, to St. Mary’s University and her personal library to Trinity University, both in San Antonio.

 
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