Path: Lesbians : Famous lesbians : Alla Nazimova
(This is a computer translation of the original article in Spanish. It should not be regarded as complete or accurate.)
Actress Alla Nazimova whose true name was Mariam Edez Adelaida Leventon, was born in Yalta (Russia) in 1879. Her parents called her Adela to abbreviate, but her mother liked the nickname "Alla". Her artistic last name, Nazimova, comes from the character of a Russian novel titled The children of the streets. She grew in a family composed by three siblings, with a young mother and a brutal father. Her childhood lapsed in an atmosphere of violence, until the family moved to Switzerland and her mother got divorced. There she was given by her parents to a family from Switzerland during several years and with them, besides learning French and German, she began to demonstrate her talent, with only seven years, in her first music lessons. She was violated systematically by one of her adoptive siblings. When her father married again, they were moved again to Russia, and there her misfortunes returned when she meet with a stepmother that mistreated her because her masculine and unattractive aspect.
Her first contact with the performance began in the father's pharmacy, where she imitated to him and some clients. However, her father wanted she kept on studying music. In 1889, she was chosen by her tutor to act in a Christmas concert; although she made it well, when Alla manifested her happiness in the reception, her father struck her. This fact would mark her artistic career later, provoking her depressions and panic after each performance. At age of 15 she entered in a boarding school in Odessa, where her partners made fun calling her "barrel", "bear" and similar nicknames. Then she lodged with a woman whose daughters acted in the local theater, and Alla became fond to go with them to help them with the suits and the make-up. After making sick her father, her brother became her tutor but he also refused that she studied interpretation until Alla it turned the seventeen years. To that age they offered her a test in the Philharmonic School of Moscow, considered the best in Russia. She studied under the direction of the famous Konstantin Stanislavsky in the Art Theater of Moscow, recently created with the intention of gathering a group of actors with a new interpretation style. In the physical thing, Alla passed of being a girl little favored to a stylized youth and attractive.
To be paid her studies, Alla prostituted in the streets until she met a rich man that helped her. In the street she met several women that soon after would be relating to the feminist movement in Russia. She abandoned the Art Theater and she entered to work in the regional repertoire, where she married a student called Sergei Golovin, but it was only an appearance marriage to hide her Jewish last name. Soon after she returned to the Art Theater and studied scene direction. One year later she abandoned the Theater due to her deception for Stanislavsky that had become more conservative, and she incorporated to a company where she knew to her new love, Pavel Orlenev, the intimate friend of writer Anton Chéjov and Maximum Gorky. In 1904 the theater company began a tour for Europe, and the fame of Alla as actress began to be forged, mainly soon after her interpretation in London of The elected town. In 1905 a group of British actresses organized a beneficent work to finance the transfer of the company of Alla to New York, where her interpretations of Chéjov and Ibsen were praised again by the critic. In United States she knew Emma Goldman, also russian-jewish, with which she began a lesbic relationship. Orlenev and their company returned to Russia, and Alla, already transformed into a star, stayed in New York where she signed a contract with Lee Schubert, a legendary theater producer that gave him carte blanche to choose the works that she wanted to interpret.
While she interpreted Beautiful Donna knew Charles Bryant, a homosexual man to which she called "husband" although they never married legally. In that time the lesbianism was not well seen in United States and the marriages of convenience were plentiful, in this case positive for both. Emma Goldman broke her relationship with Alla, due to her numerous relationships with other women, among them Mercedes De Acosta. In 1915, during the First World War, she worked in the short Fiancés of war, an allegation in favor of the pacifism. Her contracts and her privileges were shot. In 1917 she signed an excellent contract with the study Meter, with the right to choose script, masculine main character and director. Her first movie, Revelation, arrived this way where Charles Bryant also participated. Her second movie was Toys of the destination. In The Angel she played the success "Eye for eye". Alla began a sapphic circle where she imposed as guionist to June Mathis and artistic directress to the dancer Natacha Rampova, both lesbians. Her aglow success provided to her enough revenues to but an impressive mansion of Spanish style in Sunset Boulevard known as "The garden of Alla", a place where she would meet with most of the Hollywood elite and where she celebrated parties in which the alcohol, the drugs and the lesbic orgies were frequent. Her ideology, chord with which reigned in the revolutionary Russia, where it was proclaimed the end of the family and the decriminalization of the abortion, the divorce and the homosexuality, she made that the media was put in against and that her name associated to communism and lesbianism.
Alla filmed the movie Aphrodite, based on a novel of Pierre Louys, with scenes of lesbic love and sex among women, but it became public due to the prohibition of the censorship that ordered to burn the rolls. She had to sell her mansion that was divided in several bungalows for new stars of Hollywood, being reserved in the contract her right to live in one of them for life. The successes began to be alternated with failures and her popularity fell. Her relationship with the producer Meter finished and Alla began to produce her own movies in 1922 (A house of dolls and Salome), but its lesbic aesthetic was not appreciated by the American public by what she suffered strong economic losses that she tried to palliate acting in plays and movies of low budget. She traveled to Paris, where a bigger sexual freedom reigned, and Mercedes de Acosta introduced to Oscar Wilde niece, Dolly, also lesbian. In United States the repression against the lesbianism was accentuated to such extent that some actresses were imprisoned during the performance, as it was the case of Helen Menken. Alla lived her last years with her partner, Doodie, playing small papers of old woman, and she died in California, in 1945, because of a thrombosis. She is buried in the cemetery of Forest Lawn where the violets, sapphic flowers, are always plentiful.
Description: biography for Alla Nazimova, lesbian artists, life of Alla Nazimova, lesbian actress, lesbian actresses, history of Alla Nazimova, Alla Nazimova lesbian, lesbians in Hollywood, lesbianism in the cinema, Russian lesbians, sapphism of Alla nazimova, sapphic actresses.
Access to: History of the lesbianism - Famous lesbians
The complete text of this page has been registered legally and
www.lesbianas.tv it is the owner.
The copy of any part of this text without intention of appointment will be
informed the pertinent authorities.
© Latin Networks Ltd Corp., 2005.