Maria Ouspenskaya
Template:Short description Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox person Maria Alekseyevna Ouspenskaya (Template:Langx; July 29, 1876 – December 3, 1949) was a Russian actress and acting teacher.<ref name="robinson"/><ref name="nissen">Nissen, Axel. 2006. Actresses of a Certain Character: Forty Familiar Hollywood Faces from the Thirties to the Fifties. Illustrated ed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.; Template:ISBN, p. 141.</ref> She achieved success as a stage actress as a young woman in Russia, and as an older woman in Hollywood films.<ref name="WVobit">Obituary for Maria Ouspenskaya, Variety, December 7, 1949; page 63.</ref> She was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Dodsworth (1936) and Love Affair (1939).
Life and career
Ouspenskaya was born in Tula, Russia. She studied singing in Warsaw and acting in Moscow. She was a founding member of the First Studio, a theatre studio of the Moscow Art Theatre. There she was trained by Konstantin Stanislavsky and his assistant Leopold Sulerzhitsky.<ref>Benedetti, Jean. Stanislavski: His Life and Art (revised edition, 1999; original edition published in 1988). London: Methuen; Template:ISBN, pp. 209–211</ref>
The Moscow Art Theatre traveled widely throughout Europe, and when it arrived in New York City in 1922, Ouspenskaya decided to stay there. She performed regularly on Broadway over the next decade. She taught acting to Lee Strasberg among others, at the American Laboratory Theatre,<ref name=Smith-2010>Template:Cite book</ref> and in 1929, together with Richard Boleslawski, her colleague from the Moscow Art Theatre, she founded the School of Dramatic Art in New York City.<ref name=Smith-2010/> One of Ouspenskaya's students at the school was an unknown teenaged Anne Baxter.<ref name="ABobit">Template:Cite newsTemplate:Dead linkTemplate:Cbignore</ref>
Although she had appeared in a few Russian silent films many years earlier, Ouspenskaya stayed away from Hollywood until her school's financial problems forced her to look for ways to repair her finances. According to ads from Popular Song magazine in the 1930s, around this time Ouspenskaya also opened the Maria Ouspenskaya School of Dance on Vine Street in Los Angeles. Her pupils included Marge Champion, the model for Disney's Snow White.<ref name="sking">Template:Cite news</ref>
In spite of her marked Russian accent, she did find work in Hollywood, playing European characters of various national origins. Her first Hollywood role was in Dodsworth (1936), which brought her a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.<ref name="robinson">Robinson, Harlow. 2007. Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood's Russians: Biography of an Image. Boston: Northeastern UP; Template:ISBN, page 81</ref> She received a second Oscar nomination for her role in Love Affair (1939).<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
She portrayed Maleva, an old Romani fortuneteller in the horror films The Wolf Man (1941) and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), both with Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi. Her films depicting World War II were Frank Borzage's The Mortal Storm (1940), and Darryl F. Zanuck's The Man I Married (1940). Other films in which she appeared were: The Rains Came (1939), Waterloo Bridge (1940), Beyond Tomorrow (1940), Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940), and Kings Row (1942).Template:Cn An award-winning biographical film about Ouspenskaya, She-Wolf in Hollywood: The Story of Maria Ouspenskaya (which used materials from Ouspenskaya's archives at UCLA), was released in 2024.<ref>Template:Cite AV media</ref>
Death
Ouspenskaya died several days after suffering a stroke and receiving severe burns in a house fire, which was reportedly caused when she fell asleep while smoking a cigarette.<ref name=Smith-2010/> She was buried in Glendale's Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery.<ref name="Mank">Template:Cite book</ref>
Filmography
See also
References
External links
- Pages with broken file links
- 1876 births
- 1949 deaths
- 20th-century American actresses
- Actresses from the Russian Empire
- Actresses from Tula, Russia
- American film actresses
- American stage actresses
- Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Glendale)
- Deaths from fire in the United States
- Soviet emigrants to the United States