Biography
-
Born
3 January 1897
-
Born In
Lipno, Kujawsko-pomorskie, Poland
-
Died
1 August 1987 (aged 90)
Pola Negri was a Polish film actress who achieved notoriety as a femme fatale in silent films between 1910s and 1930s. Born Barbara Apolonia Chałupiec on January 3rd, 1897 in Lipno, Poland, as an only child in a poor family. Her mother had to make a living alone after Chałupiec's father was arrested by the Russians and sent to Siberia. Her father was a poor Slovak immigrant. In 1902, she moved with her mother to Warsaw, where they lived in extreme poverty. She trained as a dancer at the Ballet School in Warsaw and performed there until tuberculosis forced her to stop dancing. She turned to acting, and by the end of World War I had established herself as a popular stage actress in Warsaw, appearing in several films. In 1917, her popularity provided her with an opportunity to move to Berlin, Germany, where she appeared in several films for film directors of the UFA agency, including Max Reinhardt and Ernst Lubitsch. Their films were successful throughout the world, and in 1922 both were offered contracts with Hollywood studios and the following year Negri settled in the U.S. Her exotic style of glamour proved popular with audiences during the 1920s and her affairs with such notable actors as Charles Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino ensured that she remained in the public eye…
Her final film appearance was in the 1964 Walt Disney film The Moon-Spinners, with Hayley Mills. She died on August 1, 1987, at the age of 90.
Artist descriptions on Last.fm are editable by everyone. Feel free to contribute!
All user-contributed text on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.
