1. Blanche Yurka was an opera singer with minor roles at the Metropolitan Opera and later became a stage actress, making her Broadway debut in 1906 and established herself as a character actor of the classical stage, appearing in several films of the 1930s and 1940s.
Blanche Yurka remained active in theater and film until the late 1960s.
Blanche Yurka inherited her father's artistic and scholarly interests, including a love of music and acting.
Blanche Yurka finished grade school before her father lost his job teaching Czech language at the Jefferson School in St Paul.
Blanche Yurka found a new position with the Czech Benevolent Society in New York and moved the family to the Upper East Side of Manhattan in 1900.
Blanche Yurka's parents used their modest income to provide Blanche with singing lessons in New York even before she entered high school.
Blanche Yurka appeared in an amateur Czech-language production of Michael William Balfe's The Bohemian Girl and made her Metropolitan Opera stage debut in the Christmas 1903 production of Wagner's Parsifal - the first staged performance of the opera outside of Bayreuth - appearing as a flower girl and as the Grail-bearer.
Blanche Yurka continued her studies at the Met Opera School but was dismissed when she injured her voice singing the role of Leonora in Verdi's Il Trovatore in an amateur production.
Blanche Yurka transferred to the Institute for Musical Art, forerunner of the Juilliard School but was dismissed from there for the same reason.
Blanche Yurka had minor roles in several plays, including An Old New Yorker, The House of Bondage Our American Cousin and a pair of plays by Jane Cowl, Daybreak and Information Please.
Blanche Yurka's growing stature as an actress - combined with his jealousy - eventually came between them; they separated in 1925 and divorced in 1926.
Blanche Yurka won critical acclaim in 1935 when she replaced Edith Evans as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet opposite Cornell's Juliet.
Blanche Yurka co-adapted to stage the Spanish comedy, Spring in Autumn by Gregorio Martinez Sierra and Maria Martinez Sierra, which reunited her with Carry Nation co-stars Esther Dale, Mildred Natwick, and James Stewart, and featured Yurka singing a Puccini aria while standing on her head.
Blanche Yurka was foremost a stage actress and for a long time considered film-making an inferior art form.
Producer David O Selznick's first choice for the part of Madame Defarge was the Russian-born stage actress Alla Nazimova, who turned it down but recommended Blanche Yurka, declaring her the "only" actress for the part.
Blanche Yurka sought to play O-Lan in the 1937 film The Good Earth but lost out to Luise Rainer, who won an Academy Award for her performance.
Blanche Yurka lost the role of Pilar in For Whom the Bell Tolls to Greek actress Katina Paxinou, who went on to win an Oscar for best supporting actress.
Blanche Yurka had the role of Mrs Hunter in the soap opera Valiant Lady.
Blanche Yurka never left the theater, but as her Hollywood roles became less satisfying after the war, the pace of both her film and stage roles fell off.
Blanche Yurka toured with theater troupes in Europe both before and after the war.
Blanche Yurka aligned herself with Tallulah Bankhead's defense of the Federal Theater Project at the 1939 Senate Appropriations Committee hearings that de-funded the program in reaction to productions that were deemed sympathetic to the political left-wing.
Blanche Yurka appeared sporadically in television shows in the '50s, notably, Lux Video Theater, The Philip Morris Playhouse and Ponds Theater.
Blanche Yurka concluded her career on a note of personal triumph with her critically acclaimed London performance as The Madwoman of Chaillot.
Blanche Yurka collected her thoughts about acting technique in the book Dear Audience and wrote a memoir, Bohemian Girl.
Blanche Yurka was a popular guest at women's clubs and colleges, where she continued to perform dramatic readings.
Blanche Yurka suffered from failing health in her final years owing to arteriosclerosis and died June 6,1974, at age 86.
Blanche Yurka was interred in the same burial plot with her good friend, actress Florence Reed, in the Actors Fund of America section of Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, New York.