One Week with Vamp POLA NEGRI

From April 7th, 2010 and for the next week, Cinematheque Francaise will host a retro of Pola Negri films.

The week of Pola Negri movies is
part of an even longer three-month series entitled "Tournages:
Berlin-Paris-Hollywood".  Pola's week will run April
7-12, 2010, and will feature the recent 2006 Pola
Negri documentary and thirteen Pola Negri movies
from Bestia
(1915) to Tango Notturno (1937).

Born Barbara Appolonia
Chalupek in Janowa, Poland on December 31st, 1894, she witnessed her father, a furrier, being arrested by the Russians
and
sent to a Siberian prison camp, where he died.

Without any money, Pola, nevertheless, planned on being a ballerina, but lack of funds and poor health led her to act instead. Studying at the  Warsaw Imperial Academy of Dramatic Arts, she began acting in "Sodom's End", written by Herman Sudermann and then moved on to the  Imperial Theater in Warsaw, where Max Reinhardt discovered her. Her expressive eyes led to success in theatre and the silents. 

At the time of the German occupation, she left for Germany to act in films for Ernst
Lubitsch. Then on to Hollywood in  1922, where
she became an exotic attraction to Americans on the movie screen in
various
flamboyant roles for Paramount. Her colourful personal life attracted attention too, with her affairs with Charles Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino, among others.

Among her films are
"Madame DuBarry" (1919), "The Spanish Dancer" (1923), "Forbidden
Paradise"
(1924), "A Woman of the World" (1925), and "Hotel Imperial" (1927).

Unfortunately, her heavy accent, which clashed and hemming in by the Hays Code, which did not leave her much scope as a vamp, coupled with the spectacle she made of herself at Valentino`s funeral, more or less, ended her American film career in one fell swoop.

Back in Europe, a success was "The Woman He Scorned" (1929), in which Pola
sang. Uncomfortable  with Nazi
wooing, she decided to return to the USA.   

There she acted in 1943, in "Hi Diddle Diddle", a loveable comedy, with Adolphe
Menjou, and Disney's 1964's "The Moonspinners", with Hayley Mills, who remembers her as an authentic star, but extravagent.

Somewhere in between, she managed to  net one prince and two counts as husbands, divorcing twice.

After retiring, she spent a pleasant existence devoted to travelling, horses and poetry, while documenting her work for posterity. Pola Negri died of pneumonia on August 1st, 1987 in
San Antonio, Texas, at the ripe old age of over ninety.