Who is Maria Ouspenskaya?
Maria Ouspenskaya studied singing at the Warsaw Conservatory and acting at Adasheff's School of the Drama in Moscow. She received her practical training as an actress touring in the Russian provinces. She later joined the Moscow Art Theatre. It was here that she first worked under the direction of the great Konstantin Stanislavski, whose "Method" she would go on to promote for the remainder of her life. She came to America with the Art Theatre in 1922 and, upon their return to Moscow, defected to the US to become a dominant Broadway actress for more than a decade until she founded the School of Dramatic Art in New York in 1929. It was to help keep the school funded that she accepted her first Hollywod film, Dodsworth (1936). She had appeared in six silent movies in Russia earlier in her career. This lucrative association, for Ouspenskaya, Hollywood and the viewing public, would last for more than a dozen years and two dozen films. Thanks to her often-superior demeanor and addiction to astrology, she could prove maddening on the set. She remained in nearly daily communication with L.A. Times' astrologer Carroll Righter who would advise her on the best times to appear on camera along with when and where to travel. As a consequence, most casts and crews disliked the over-bearing, wispy 90-pound actress intensely. She bounced between prestigious A-pictures (Love Affair (1939), Waterloo Bridge (1940)) and B-movies (Mystery of Marie Roget (1942), Tarzan and the Amazons (1945)), performing, and behaving, with equal intensity. She is especially notable for having appeared in the last great Universal horror entry, The Wolf Man (1941) and the interesting Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). A heavy smoker, she fell asleep in bed with a lit cigarette in late November 1949 and suffered massive burns. She died of a stroke in the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital three days later.
Overview
- Nicknames
- Marie Ouspenskaya, Mme. Maria Ouspenskaya, Mariya Uspenskaya
Trivia
- Co-founder of the American Laboratory Theater with Polish actor/director Richard Boleslawski, she was the first Russian actor from the Moscow Art Theatre to teach the Stanislavski Method in the United States. Her methods greatly influenced her young students Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman, founders of the Group Theater (1931-40). Strasberg first practiced his very personal variation of the system, now known as "The Method," with the Group actors Stella Adler, Luther Adler, Sanford Meisner, Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, Franchot Tone, Morris Carnovsky, John Garfield and Robert Lewis. Adler went on to teach Marlon Brando; Meisner taught Robert Duvall and Diane Keaton; Lewis taught Meryl Streep. What the world knows as the psychologically realistic American acting style can be traced back to the enduring influence of Madame Ouspenskaya.
- She received two supporting Oscar nominations, for Dodsworth (1936) and Love Affair (1939). She appeared in the former for only four minutes and in the latter a total of ten minutes.
- Taught acting at New York's American Laboratory Theatre in the 1920s until forming her own acting school, the Maria Ouspenskaya School of Dramatic Arts, in 1929. She moved the studio to Hollywood in the late 1930s when her film career began to flourish. Some of her more famous students included John Garfield and acting gurus Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg.
- In 1936, she and Gale Sondergaard became the first two of 53 actresses to receive an Oscar nomination for their film debuts. She was nominated Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Dodsworth (1936). This was her American film debut and feature film debut. She had previously appeared in five Russian short films.
- An actor/instructor with Konstantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre beginning in 1911, she toured throughout Europe during the Communist Revolution and appeared in over 100 plays. When the company departed for Moscow after a tour in the United States, she remained behind.