Silent Wednesday

As some of you may know, I love my Silent film, so for today’s blip, I am giving you a blip about Pola Negri, who was born on this day in 1897 (died 1st August 1987).

Pola was a Polish stage and film actress who achieved worldwide fame during the silent and golden eras of Hollywood and European film for her tragedienne and femme fatale roles.

She was the first European film star to be invited to Hollywood, and became one of the most popular actresses in American silent film. Her varied career included work as an actress in theater and vaudeville, as a recording artist, as a ballerina, and as an author.

Negri ended up becoming one of the most popular Hollywood actresses of the era, and certainly the richest woman of the film industry at the time, living in a mansion in Los Angeles modeled after the White House.

Paramount Pictures used Negri as a mysterious European "femme fatale" and a clotheshorse as they had done with Gloria Swanson, and staged an ongoing feud between the two actresses, which actor Charlie Chaplin recalled in his autobiography as "a mélange of cooked-up jealousies and quarrels”.

In the run up to World War 2, Pola who was living in Germany at the time had to flee to the United States after she was wrongly accused of having an affair with Adolf Hitler.

In 1948, director Billy Wilder approached Negri to appear as Norma Desmond in the film Sunset Boulevard (1950), after Mae Murray, Mae West, and Mary Pickford declined the role. Negri reportedly declined the role because she felt that the screenplay was not ready and that Montgomery Clift, who was slated to play the Joe Gillis character at the time, was not a good choice for the character. The role of Gillis eventually went to William Holden, and Gloria Swanson accepted the Norma Desmond role.

In 1964, she starred with Haley Mills and Eli Wallach in the Disney film, ‘The Moon-spinners’. Negri's appearance in the film as eccentric jewel collector Madame Habib was shot in London over the course of two weeks. While she was filming The Moon-Spinners, she made a sensation by appearing before the London press at her hotel in the company of a feisty cheetah on a steel chain leash.

You most likely have never heard of Pola, but she was one of the iconic film actresses from Hollywood’s Golden era, long gone now.

Anyway, thanks for letting me tell you a bit about Pola, hope you have had a good day.