HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ALLA NAZIMOVA
(June 4, 1878 - July 13, 1945)

The following bio of Ms. Nazimova was written by Romy Nordlinger published in the program for Stage Struck From Kemble to Kate, Snapple Theater Center, December, 2013.

She was born Adelaida (Alla) Leventon in Yalta, the youngest of three children of a brutal, ne'er do well Jewish pharmacist and his affluent, unstable wife.  She adopted her pseudonym (the last name of a heroine in a novel) at the age of 10. Her father forbade her to use the family name, fearing that she would embarrass him. After she made her debut playing the violin to enthusiastic applause, he took her home and caned her so severely that he broke her arm. "Just because a few provincial fools applaud you, don't imagine you're Paganini," he said.
    Already wounded psychologically by the departure of her  mother three years earlier, Alla began to examine "Nazimova: from the outside, analyzing the way she looked, criticizing the unattractive way she wept."

She took naturally to acting. "If I have lived not beautifully, I must act beautifully," she wrote in her diary. At age 17 Ada Leventon abandoned her training as a violinist and went to Moscow, the greatest theater center in the world, to work with V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko and Konstantin  Stanislavsky and get to know Meyerhold and Chekhov.  Using her street smarts to finance her acting education she honed her dramatic gifts. But in turn-of-the-century Russia, her outsize ambition was limited by her Jewish origins.

She graduated into the Moscow Art Theatre but left to tour the provinces and then work with the Paul Orleneff Company in St. Petersburg. The company visited New York in 1905 performing in The Chosen People on the lower east side. Although she spoke not a word of English, she so impressed Henry Miller and the Shuberts that they hired her on the condition she learn English in six months. She did and opened in
Hedda Gabler on November 13, 1906. She adopted the name Nazimova at this time. During the next two years Nazimova was aclaimed for her portrayals of other Ibsen characters: Nora in A Doll's House, Hedwig in The Wild Duck, and Hilda in The Master Builder. She was so successful that the Shuberts built a theatre especially for her. On April 18, 1910, she opened the Nazimova Theatre, playing Rita Allmers in Ibsen's Little Eyolf. Ibsen had been so impressed with her interpretations of his characters that he declared "Nazimova will stand without a peer on the American stage as the delineator of the soul-harrassed woman."

Nazimova's fame led her to Hollywood, where from 1915 to 1925 she appeared in 17 motion pictures, from potboilers like War Brides (1916) and Heart of a Child (1920) to silent-screen versions of her stage successes. With her role in War Brides, a strident feminist was invented, if only temporarily, for the screen. Nazimova boasted to a reporter for the New York American that her decision to appear as a figure of suffrage in War Brides was intended to be a contribution to the "womanhood of the world." By the mid-1920s, Alla was in financial straits and agreed to allow her mansion to be developed into a hotel. The property-renamed The Garden of Allah Hotel & Villas-opened on January 9, 1927.

She returned to the stage in 1928 as Madame Ravenskaya in
Eva Le Gallienne's production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. She became a U.S. citizen in 1927 and went on to create the roles of Christine in Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) and O-Lan in Pearl Buck's The Good Earth (1932).  She also directed and starred in two more very well-received New York City revivals of Ibsen's Ghosts (1935) and Hedda Gabler (1936).
       She returned occasionally to movies for small parts including the 1941 remake of Blood and Sand as Tyrone Power's mother, In Our Time (1944) and finally in the World War ll tear-jerker Since You Went Away (1944) with Claudette Colbert. She died at the age of 66 of a coronary thrombosis.