Maria Ouspenskaya
Maria Alekseyevna Ouspenskaya was a Russian actress and acting teacher. She achieved success as a stage actress as a young woman in Russia, and as an older woman in Hollywood films. She was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Dodsworth and Love Affair. Ouspenskaya is the List of Russian [Academy Award winners and nominees#Best Actress in a Supporting Role|first Russian actress] to be nominated for an Oscar.
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.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, 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. One of Ouspenskaya's students at the school was an unknown teenaged Anne Baxter.
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.
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, earning her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and making her the first Russian actress to be nominated for an Oscar. She received a second Academy Award nomination in the same category for her role in Love Affair.
She portrayed Maleva, an old Romani fortuneteller in the horror films The Wolf Man and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, both with Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi. Her films depicting World War II were Frank Borzage's The Mortal Storm, and Darryl F. Zanuck's The Man I Married. Other films in which she appeared were: The Rains Came, Waterloo Bridge, Beyond Tomorrow, Dance, Girl, Dance, Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, and Kings Row. An award-winning biographical film about Ouspenskaya, She-Wolf in Hollywood: The Story of Maria Ouspenskaya, was released in 2024.