61 Facts About Pola Negri

Pola Negri was a Polish stage and film actress and singer.

Pola Negri signed with Paramount in 1922, making her the first European actress in history to be contracted in Hollywood.

Pola Negri spent much of the 1920s working in the United States appearing in numerous films for Paramount, establishing herself as one of the most popular actresses in American silent film.

Pola Negri made only two films after 1940, her last screen credit being in Walt Disney's The Moon-Spinners.

Pola Negri spent her later life largely outside the public sphere.

Pola Negri became a naturalized US citizen in 1951, and spent the remainder of her life living in San Antonio, Texas, where she died of pneumonia secondary to a brain tumor for which she refused treatment, in 1987, aged 90.

Pola Negri's father, Juraj Chalupec, was an itinerant Romani-Slovak tinsmith from Neslusa.

Pola Negri is very temperamental, but she has her temper under tight control.

Pola Negri made her theatrical debut before her graduation at The Small Theatre in Warsaw on 2 October 1912.

Pola Negri continued to perform there while finishing her studies at the academy, graduating in 1914.

Pola Negri's graduating performance was as Hedwig in Ibsen's The Wild Duck, which resulted in offers to join a number of the prominent theatres in Warsaw.

Pola Negri made an appearance at the Grand Theatre in Sumurun, as well as in the Small Theatre, and at the Summer Theatre in the Saxon Garden.

Pola Negri debuted in film in 1914 in Slave to her Senses.

Pola Negri appeared in a variety of films made by the Warsaw film industry, including Bestia, Room No 13, His Last Gesture, Students, and The Wife.

Paramount Pictures mogul Jesse Lasky saw the premiere of Madame DuBarry in Berlin in 1919, and Paramount invited Pola Negri to come to Hollywood in 1921.

Pola Negri signed a $3,000 a week contract with Paramount and arrived in New York in a flurry of publicity on 12 September 1922.

Pola 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.

Pola Negri was a frequent photography subject of Hollywood portrait photographer Eugene Robert Richee, and several photographs of her were taken during this period.

The general opinion was that the Pickford film was more polished, but the Pola Negri film was more entertaining.

In 1928 Negri was earning $10,000 a week, and was directed by Rowland V Lee in another three films, before making her last film for Paramount Pictures, The Woman from Moscow, with Norman Kerry.

Pola Negri claimed in her autobiography she opted not to renew her contract with Paramount, choosing to retire from films and live as a wife at the Chateau de Rueil-Seraincourt, near Vigny that she owned and where she had married her second husband.

Pola Negri miscarried her pregnancy and later learned that her husband was gambling her fortune away on speculative business ventures, which strained their relationship.

Pola Negri went back to acting when an independent production company offered her work in a British film production that was to be distributed by Gaumont-British.

Pola Negri returned to Hollywood in 1931 to begin filming her first talking film, A Woman Commands.

Pola Negri went on a successful vaudeville tour to promote the song.

Pola Negri then was employed in the leading role of the touring theatre production A Trip to Pressburg, which premiered at the Shubert Theatre in New York.

Pola Negri returned to France to appear in Fanatisme, a historical costume film about Napoleon III.

Mazurka gained much popularity in Germany and abroad and became one of Adolf Hitler's favorite films, a fact that, along with her admiring comments about the efficiency of the German film industry, gave birth to a rumor in 1937 of Pola Negri having had an affair with Hitler.

Pola Negri sued Pour Vous, the French magazine which had circulated the rumor, for libel, and won.

Pola Negri stayed in Monte Estoril, at the Hotel Atlantico, between 28 June and 30 June 1940.

Pola Negri sailed to New York from Lisbon, Portugal, and initially lived by selling off jewelry.

Pola Negri was hired in a supporting role as the temperamental opera singer Genya Smetana for the 1943 comedy Hi Diddle Diddle.

In 1944, Pola Negri was engaged by booking agent Miles Ingalls for a nationwide vaudeville tour.

In 1948, director Billy Wilder approached Pola Negri to appear as Norma Desmond in the film Sunset Boulevard, after Mae Murray, Mae West, Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, and Mary Pickford declined the role.

Pola 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.

Pola Negri came out of retirement to appear in the Walt Disney film The Moon-Spinners, which starred Hayley Mills and Eli Wallach.

Pola Negri made an appearance at the Museum of Modern Art on 30 April 1970, for a screening event in her honor, which featured her film A Woman of the World and selections from her films.

Pola Negri was a guest of honor at the 1972 screening of Carmen held at the Witte Museum in San Antonio.

In 1975, director Vincente Minnelli approached Pola Negri to appear as the Contessa Sanziani in A Matter of Time, but Pola Negri did not accept due to poor health.

Pola Negri met Rudolph Valentino at a costume party held by Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst at the San Simeon estate and was reportedly Valentino's lover until his death in 1926.

Pola Negri caused a media sensation at his New York funeral on 24 August 1926, at which she "fainted" several times, and according to actor Ben Lyon, arranged for a large floral arrangement that spelled "P-O-L-A" to be placed on Valentino's coffin.

At the time of his death and for the remainder of her life, Pola Negri claimed Valentino was the love of her life.

Pola Negri soon married again, to the Georgian self-styled "Prince" Serge Mdivani.

Pola Negri grieved the loss of her child for the rest of her life; she and Mdivani divorced on 2 April 1931.

When Pola Negri returned to the United States in the early 1940s, she became close friends with Margaret West, an oil heiress and vaudeville actress whom she had originally met in the 1930s.

Pola Negri, who remained a devout Catholic in her later life, spent her time raising funds for Catholic charities with both her mother and West.

On 12 January 1951, Pola Negri became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Pola Negri lived with West until the latter's death of heart failure in 1963.

Pola Negri moved out of the home she had shared with West into a townhouse located at 7707 Broadway in San Antonio, where she spent the remainder of her years, largely out of the public eye.

Some scholars, such as Rudolph Valentino biographer Emily Leider, have suggested that Pola Negri was bisexual and that she and West were romantic partners.

Pola Negri died on 1 August 1987, aged 90 at the Northeast Baptist Hospital in San Antonio, Texas.

Pola Negri's death was caused by pneumonia for which she had been rushed to the hospital a week earlier; however, she was suffering from a brain tumor, for which she had refused treatment for two years.

Pola Negri's death received extensive coverage in her hometown newspapers San Antonio Light, and San Antonio Express-News, and in publications such as Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and Variety.

Pola Negri was interred in Calvary Cemetery, East Los Angeles next to her mother Eleonora, who died in 1954 from pancreatic cancer.

Pola Negri has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contribution to Motion Pictures at 6933 Hollywood Boulevard.

Pola Negri was the 11th star in Hollywood history to place her hand and foot prints in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

The Polish Film Festival of Los Angeles remembered her with the Pola Negri Award, given to outstanding film artists, and the Pola Negri Museum in Lipno gives a Polita award for outstanding artist achievement.

Pola Negri makes a cameo appearance in the TV film Young Indiana Jones and the Hollywood Follies.

In 2006, a feature-length documentary about Negri's life, Pola Negri: Life Is a Dream in Cinema, premiered at the Seventh Annual Polish Film Festival of Los Angeles.

Pola Negri: Life Is a Dream in Cinema has played at Negri retrospective screenings in Europe and the US, most notably at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris.

Pola Negri recorded a French-language version of "Paradise" in Paris in 1933 with "Mes Nuits sont Mortes" as its flip side.