Alla Nazimova

Vanity Fair, November 1931

Ever theatrical, the tempestuous tragedienne Alla Nazimova (1879-1945) stormed onto the American stage wrapped in all the pathos of czarist Russia. She caused a sensation in Shaw and O'Neill and became Broadway's Ibsen girl. On-screen, she sizzled with Valentino in Camille. Offscreen, she sizzled with his wife, domineering art director Natacha Rambova, who Beardsleyized Alla's production of Salome (with Nazimova as the ultimate undulating vamp, and a cast of homosexuals in deference to Oscar Wilde). Later the seance-holding vegetarian became a theatrical landlady, turning her Sunset Boulevard estate, the Garden of Allah, into the Algonquin West. (Bulldozed in 1959, her Babylon is now the Great Western Bank.) Fittingly, perhaps, Nazimova felt her greatest role was as the hapless landowner Mme. Ranevskaya in Eva Le Gallienne's acclaimed 1928 production of The Cherry Orchard. This month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Peter Brook directs his wife, Natasha Parry, as Ranevskaya in what promises to be another major revival of Chekhov's last play—Alla willing.