Alla Nazimova

Alla Nazimova , 1879-1945, Russian-American actress. She turned from music to drama, studying with Stanislavsky and later appearing at the Moscow Art Theater . In 1905 she emigrated to New York City and played Russian roles in her native tongue. She made her English-speaking debut (1906) in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and thereafter became the foremost interpreter of Ibsen in the United States. In 1910 she took over the Thirty-Ninth Street Theatre, which was renamed the Nazimova. She gave memorable performances in Chekhov's Cherry Orchard (1928) and in O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). Her films include Camille (1921), A Doll's House (1922), and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944).

Bibliography: See biography by G. Lambert (1997).

Nazimova, Alla (1879–1945), Russian actress, who studied with Nemirovich-Danchenko, acted for a season with the Moscow Art Theatre, and in 1904 was the leading lady of a theatre company in St Petersburg. She toured Europe and America with a Russian company and, having learnt English in less than six months, made her first appearance in an English-speaking part—Ibsen's Hedda Gabler—in 1906 at the Princess Theatre in New York under the management of the Shuberts, who built and named for her the Nazimova Theatre, later the Thirty-ninth Street Theatre, which she opened in 1910 with Ibsen's Little Eyolf. A superb actress, vibrant, passionate, yet subtle, she astonished Broadway audiences with the variety of her characterizations; but by 1918 her popularity began to wane and she spent the next 10 years in films. She then returned to the stage, appearing with Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre and for the Theatre Guild in Ibsen, Chekhov, Turgenev, and O'Neill, in whose Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) she created the part of Christine Mannon. In 1935 she directed and starred in her own version of Ibsen's Ghosts, on Broadway and then on a national tour.

Nazimova, Alla (1879–1945), actress. The dark, intense Russian‐born leading lady studied in Switzerland and in her homeland, where she soon became known in St. Petersburg. She came to America in 1905 and was performing at Orlenoff's Russian Lyceum on Third Street when Henry Miller spotted her and convinced her to learn English and to star in his production of Hedda Gabler. Walter Prichard Eaton wrote, “Her Hedda Gabler was a high‐born exotic, an orchid of a woman, baleful, fascinating—and to some of us not at all like Ibsen's heroine.” After seeing her in several other plays, he concluded, “She has brought something to our stage it did not possess before, something modern, subtle, exciting, the power to suggest finer shades of meaning, symbols in the dialogue.” Nazimova was best known for her acting in such classic works as A Doll's House, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, The Cherry Orchard, A Month in the Country, and Ghosts, and she created one major contemporary role: the murderous wife Christine Mannon in Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). Biography: Nazimova, Gavin Lambert, 1997.