Pola Negri
Pola Negri was a Polish stage and film actress and singer. She achieved worldwide fame during the silent and golden eras of Hollywood and European film for her tragedienne and femme fatale roles. She was also acknowledged as a sex symbol of her time.
Raised in the Congress Kingdom of Poland, Negri's childhood was marked by several personal hardships: After her father was sent to Siberia, she was raised by her single mother in poverty, and suffered tuberculosis as a teenager. Negri recovered, and went on to study ballet and acting in Warsaw, Poland, becoming a well-known stage actress there. In 1917, she relocated to Germany, where she began appearing in silent films for the Berlin-based UFA studio. Her film performances for UFA came to the attention of Hollywood executives at Paramount Pictures, who offered her a film contract.
Negri signed with Paramount in 1922, making her the first European actress to be contracted in Hollywood. She spent much of the 1920s working in the United States appearing in numerous films for Paramount, establishing herself as one of the most popular actresses in American silent film. In the 1930s, during the emergence of sound film, Negri returned to Europe, where she appeared in multiple films for Pathé Films and UFA, and also began a career as a recording artist. She made only two films after 1940, her last screen credit being in Walt Disney's The Moon-Spinners.
Negri spent her later life largely outside the public sphere. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1951, and spent the remainder of her life living in San Antonio, Texas. In 1987, aged 90, she died of pneumonia secondary to a brain tumor for which she refused treatment.
Early life
Negri was born Barbara Apolonia Chałupiec on 3 January 1897 in Lipno, Congress Poland, Russian Empire, the only surviving child of a Polish mother, Eleonora Kiełczewska. According to Negri, her mother came from impoverished Polish nobility, with her family having lost their fortune over support of Napoléon Bonaparte. Negri's father, Juraj Chalupec, was an itinerant Romani-Slovak tinsmith from Nesluša. After her father was arrested by the Russian authorities for revolutionary activities and sent to Siberia, she and her mother moved to Warsaw, where they lived in poverty, with her mother supporting them by working as a cook.Chałupiec was raised Catholic by her mother, who was a lifelong practicing Catholic. In her youth, Chałupiec was accepted into Warsaw's Imperial Ballet Academy. Her first dance performance was in the danse des petits cygnes in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake; she worked her way up to a solo role in the Saint-Léon ballet Coppélia. However, a bout with tuberculosis forced her to stop dancing; she was sent to a sanatorium in Zakopane to recover. During her three-month convalescence, she adopted the pseudonym Pola Negri, after the Italian novelist and poet Ada Negri; "Pola" was short for her own name, Apolonia.
Career
Polish theatre and film
After Negri returned from the sanatorium, she successfully auditioned at the Warsaw Imperial Academy of Dramatic Arts. Alongside her formal schooling at the academy, she took private classes outside with renowned Polish stage actress and professor Honorata Leszczyńska. She made her theatrical debut before her graduation at The Small Theatre in Warsaw on 2 October 1912.She made her stage debut in 1913 in Gerhardt Hauptmann's Hannele in Warsaw and appeared the following year in her first film, Niewolnica zmysłów. She continued to perform there while finishing her studies at the academy, graduating in 1914. Her graduating performance was as Hedwig in Ibsen's The Wild Duck, which resulted in offers to join a number of the prominent theatres in Warsaw.
By the end of World War I, Negri had established herself as a popular stage actress. She made an appearance at the Grand Theatre in Sumurun, as well as in the Small Theatre, and at the Summer Theatre in the Saxon Garden. She debuted in film in 1914 in Slave to her Senses. She appeared in a variety of films made by the Warsaw film industry, including Bestia, Room No. 13, His Last Gesture, Students, and The Wife.
Ernst Lubitsch and German silent film career
Negri's popularity in Poland provided her with an opportunity to move to Berlin, Germany in 1917, to appear as the dancing girl in a German revival of Max Reinhardt's theatre production of Sumurun. In this production, she met Ernst Lubitsch, who at the time was producing comedies for the German film studio UFA. Negri was first signed with Saturn Films, making six films with them, including Wenn das Herz in Haß erglüht. After this, she signed to UFA's roster; some of the films that she made with UFA include Mania, Der Gelbe Schein, and Komtesse Doddy.In 1918, Lubitsch convinced UFA to let him create a large-scale film with Negri as the main character. The result was Die Augen der Mumie Ma, which was a popular success and led to a series of Lubitsch/Negri collaborations, each larger in scale than the previous film. The next was Carmen, which was followed by Madame Dubarry. Madame Dubarry became a huge international success, brought down the American embargo on German films, and launched a demand that briefly threatened to dislodge Hollywood's dominance in the international film market. Negri and Lubitsch made three German films together after this, Sumurun, Die Bergkatze, and Die Flamme, and UFA employed Negri for films with other directors, including Vendetta and Sappho, many of which were purchased by American distributors and shown in the United States.
Hollywood responded to this new threat by buying out key German talent, beginning with the procuration of the services of Lubitsch and Negri. Lubitsch was the first director to be brought to Hollywood, with Mary Pickford calling for his services in her costume film Rosita. Paramount Pictures mogul Jesse Lasky saw the premiere of Madame Dubarry in Berlin in 1919, and Paramount invited Negri to come to Hollywood in 1921. She signed a $3,000 a week contract with Paramount and arrived in New York in a flurry of publicity on 12 September 1922. This made Negri the first-ever Continental star to be imported into Hollywood, setting a precedent for imported European stars that included Vilma Bánky, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich, among many others. The Hot Dog, a Cleveland monthly publication, in its own promotional advertisement for Paramount in February 1922, claimed Negri's true name was Paula Schwartz, and that she was Jewish, which was completely untrue.
Paramount period
Negri ended up becoming one of the most popular Hollywood actresses of the era, and certainly the richest woman of the film industry at the time, living in a mansion in Los Angeles modeled after the White House. While in Hollywood, she started several ladies' fashion trends, some of which are still fashion staples today, including red painted toenails, fur boots, and turbans. Negri was a frequent photography subject of Hollywood portrait photographer Eugene Robert Richee, and several photographs of her were taken during this period.Negri's first two Paramount films were Bella Donna and The Cheat, both of which were directed by George Fitzmaurice and were remakes of Paramount films from 1915. Her first spectacle film was the Herbert Brenon-directed The Spanish Dancer, based on the Victor Hugo novel Don César de Bazan. The initial screenplay was intended as a vehicle for Rudolph Valentino before he left Paramount and was reworked for Negri. Rosita, Lubitsch's film with Mary Pickford, was released the same year and happened to be based on Don César de Bazan. According to the book Paramount Pictures and the People Who Made Them, "Critics had a field day comparing the two. The general opinion was that the Pickford film was more polished, but the Negri film was more entertaining."
Initially Paramount used Negri as a mysterious European femme fatale and a clothes horse as they had done with Gloria Swanson and staged an ongoing feud between the two actresses, which actor Charlie Chaplin recalled in his autobiography as "a mélange of cooked-up jealousies and quarrels." Negri was concerned that Paramount was mishandling her career and image and arranged for her former director Ernst Lubitsch to direct her in the critically acclaimed Forbidden Paradise. It was the last time the two worked together in any film. By 1925, Negri's on-screen continental opulence was starting to wear thin with some segments of the American audience, a situation parodied in the Mal St. Clair-directed comedy A Woman of the World, in which Negri starred.
File:Pola Negri and Warner Baxter - Three Sinners 5.jpg|thumb|right|upright=.9|Negri with Warner Baxter in a publicity still for Three Sinners
In 1926, Negri starred in The Crown of Lies and Good and Naughty, the former of which earned an unfavorable review in Photoplay magazine, which deemed it an "impossible Pola Negri vehicle. If you have nothing else to do—see this and suffer with Pola." Paramount transitioned into casting Negri in international peasant roles the following year in films such as the Mauritz Stiller-directed and Erich Pommer-produced Hotel Imperial, in an apparent effort to give her a more down-to-earth, relatable image. Although Hotel Imperial reportedly fared well at the box office, her next film Barbed Wire, directed by Rowland V. Lee, and a number of subsequent films did not, reportedly due to negative publicity about her behavior at Rudolph Valentino's funeral and her rebound marriage to Georgian prince Serge Mdivani, although her films continued to fare well internationally. Negri defended herself, saying: "It is difficult for a foreigner coming to America...I had been told so much what not to do. It was particularly difficult for me, a Slav. My emotion seemed exaggerated to Americans. I cannot help that I haven't the Anglo-Saxon restraint and tact."
In 1928 Negri was earning $10,000 a week, and was directed by Rowland V. Lee in another three films, before making her last film for Paramount Pictures, The Woman from Moscow, with Norman Kerry. Negri claimed in her autobiography she opted not to renew her contract with Paramount, choosing to retire from films and live as a wife at the Château de Rueil-Seraincourt, near Vigny that she owned and where she had married her second husband. The same year, her short volume featuring reflections on art and film, La Vie et Le Rêve au Cinéma, edited by Albin Michel, was published. By 1929, she had reportedly earned $5 million.