The short life and mysterious death of Vera Kholodnaya, Russian silent film star

Love of the “King of Odessa”

Moishe-Yakov Vinnitsky, aka Mishka Yaponchik.
Photo: wikimedia.org On a winter day in 1919, the king of Odessa thieves Mishka Yaponchik received a letter in which a stranger begged for help and asked to keep her appeal a secret. Intrigued, Mishka agreed to the meeting. Imagine his surprise when Vera Kholodnaya herself entered the office!

Until this moment, Yaponchik was not personally acquainted with the famous actress, although, according to rumors, he was an ardent admirer of hers. It was even rumored that Mishka was so in love with Vera that he became timid at the sight of the actress, never daring to approach her.

Vera never resorted to the help of her fans, even though they included very influential people. But this time the situation was hopeless...

Memory

The name of the actress in the USSR was forbidden to be mentioned in a serious tone - by the thirties she had become the personification of bourgeois cinema and an idle lifestyle. However, in 1975, Nikita Mikhalkov shot the film “Slave of Love,” which clearly hints at the life and fate of the actress (though in a rather loose presentation). Since it was impossible to use her real name, Mikhalkov called his main character Olga Voznesenskaya - her role was played by Elena Solovey.

In the mid-1990s, it was decided to install a cenotaph of Vera Kholodnaya at the Odessa cemetery - it was placed in the fence of the grave of Pyotr Chardynin. In 2003, on the occasion of the actress’s 110th birthday, a monument was erected on Preobrazhenskaya Street in Odessa opposite the house in which she died. It is included in the territory of Vera Kholodnaya Square.

And for the 120th anniversary, in 2013, the Ukrainian Post issued a commemorative stamp dedicated to the actress.

Unprecedented fidelity of the actress

By 1918, Vera Kholodnaya had starred in fifty films and was already a star on a European scale. The public did not believe that the actress, who so convincingly portrayed fatal seductresses, was in fact absolutely faithful to her husband.

There was a well-known scandal on the set when Vera refused Odessa tycoon Solodovnikov , who tried to simply buy her. The director of the film, Bauer, tried to persuade Vera to meet with the millionaire again, but the actress responded by disrupting the filming.

Vera Levchenko and Vladimir Kholodny met at a high school graduation party. Having decided to invite the girl on a date, Vladimir appointed a race track as the meeting place, but he did not show up. And when the angry Vera was ready to leave, one of the cars participating in the race drove up to the podium. The driver was Vladimir.

Six months later, despite the fact that Vera’s relatives were against such an early marriage, they got married. Then a daughter, Evgenia, . Doctors said that Vera would not be able to give birth again, and an adopted daughter, Nonna .

Vladimir turned out to be a terrible jealous person and forbade Vera to even think about the scene when she came home with her first contract. Vera obeyed, but not for long. One day, Vladimir saw his wife’s name on the poster of the new film “ Anna Karenina ”. She had to promise that she would never go out in public again.

Vera Kholodnaya (standing) in the film “A Life for a Life”

A bright but short creative path

Even at the beginning of her marriage, Vera became a regular at the Alatr artistic circle, which was quite popular in Moscow. She came here even in the most difficult times. In 1915, in a circle, Kholodnaya met director Evgeniy Bauer, who worked at the film studio of Alexander Khanzhonkov. Evgeny was just about to shoot the film “Song of Triumphant Love” and invited Vera to play the main role. Bauer was a professional decorator, so in his works he focused not on the performing ability of the actress, but on her external data.

“Song of Triumphant Love” was an incredible audience success, and Vera Kholodnaya, who instantly became a star, literally hypnotized the whole of Russia. Studio director Khanzhonkov foresaw such success even at the time of filming and signed a three-year contract with the actress. In the same 1915, she played in several more films:

"Moon Beauty";
“Beauty should reign in the world”;
"Children of the Century";
"Awakening";
“Children of Vanyushin”;
"Flame of the Sky"

By 1916, Kholodnaya already occupied the status of a first-rate movie star in Russia. Huge queues formed outside the cinemas, people stormed the box office and halls, sometimes even breaking windows and tearing doors off their hinges. Thanks to the actress Kholodnaya, the country began to try a voluptuous drug called “cinema.” The charming Vera took people with her into the world of dreams, and the people longed for this again and again.

For a long time she herself did not believe in such fame. Sometimes she dressed discreetly and, with her younger sister Sonya, went to the most remote area of Moscow to watch the audience’s reaction to her performance in the cinema.

Kholodnaya repeatedly received offers to move to Europe. She was invited to join the troupe of his theater by Stanislavsky himself. Everyone with whom she worked, and at whom she only cast a fleeting glance, fell in love with Vera. She had a lot of fans, but she never cheated on her beloved husband. When he was seriously wounded at the front, Vera quit filming and rushed to the hospital to nurse her Volodya.

In 1916, she moved from Khanzhonkov to the film studio of Dmitry Kharitonov, where she starred in more than twenty films, the most famous of which:

"Chess of Life";
"Capital Poison";
"For the sake of happiness";
"By the fireplace";
“Forget about the fireplace, the lights have gone out.”

A reluctant star

In the fall of 1914, Vladimir was called to the front. After the last savings were spent on her mother’s treatment, Vera remembered the letter of recommendation to Khanzhonkov , one of the pioneers of Russian cinema. He cast Vera in the title role, and the actress immediately gained popularity.

Films with Kholodnaya's participation were released every 3 weeks and invariably enjoyed wild success. Other actresses considered Vera an upstart and mediocrity, and they weaved intrigues. But evidence of her talent was that even after the change of power in Russia, the cinema star remained a star.

When news came from the front that her husband was seriously wounded, Vera ran away from the filming of the film “The Awakening” and spent two weeks at Vladimir’s bedside. During this time, the director found a replacement for her in the person of Olga Rakhmanova , but Khanzhonkov ordered Vera to be returned to filming.

After being wounded, my husband suffered from headaches and began to stutter. I had to forget about my career as a lawyer. Vladimir tried to open his own business, for which Vera borrowed money from Khanzhonkov. But it went bankrupt after six months, and Vera had to work off the debt by filming two films at the same time.

Politics versus art

When the Bolsheviks came to power, one of her admirers, the Grand Duke, begged Vera to go to Europe, but she replied: she has everything she needs - a family and a job she loves.

When the next film was being filmed, location shooting was required. It so happened that traditionally they were held in the south of Russia, but there was a war there. Vera knew nothing about politics and was not interested in war. She was glad that she was going to the sea with her whole family. Just before the trip, Vera was summoned to the Kremlin and presented with an anonymous letter accusing her husband of planning to take his family abroad from Odessa by sea.

Vera was nevertheless given permission to travel to Odessa, but Vladimir, daughter Nonna and Vera’s grandmother were left in Moscow as hostages.

Odessa poster, films with Vera Kholodnaya, 1919. Photo: wikimedia.org

“Be silent, sadness, be silent,” or the whole truth about Vera Kholodnaya

Vera Kholodnaya with her daughter

Her first film role was as an Italian nanny in the film adaptation of Anna Karenina. Director Vladimir Gardin did not consider her acting talented, but still gave her a letter of recommendation to his colleague, director of the Khanzhonkov studio, Evgeniy Bauer. Actually, Bauer made a star out of Kholodnaya. Understanding full well that this was a beauty with no acting experience, he emphasized her natural manners and appearance, allowing her to “just live and not play.” Khanzhonkov's atelier produced tape after tape with her participation. In the first year, she starred in 13 films, and the success of each subsequent one was greater than the previous one. According to the recollections of her relatives, she dearly loved her husband and, when he was seriously wounded near Warsaw in August 1915, she went to nurse him, abandoning filming.

In 1916, Vera Kholodnaya moved from Khanzhonkov’s company to Kharitonov’s studio, where she successfully starred with Pyotr Chardynin, the author of one of Kholodnaya’s most famous surviving films, “Be silent, sadness, be silent...”.

“... When I started acting for the screen, directors intimidated me, they said that they were despots who violated the will of the artists and did not take into account their creative understanding of the roles. But I had to make sure that it was all nothing.”

In the 1910s, Vera Kholodnaya really had an incredible number of fans; she was often recognized on the street, and in Odessa she was not allowed to pass at all. Postcards with her portraits - the only documentary evidence preserved in large quantities - were published in countless editions. The ladies diligently copied her style and hats, which, by the way, she made herself.

Russian silent film actress Vera Kholodnaya. Two pre-revolutionary postcards

In the summer of 1918, with the employees of Kharitonov's studio, headed by Chardynin, the actress went to Odessa to film, where she died of the Spanish flu in February 1919. Her husband survived her by no more than a year; he died during a typhoid epidemic.

As often happens, viewers confuse screen characters and actors, attributing to real people the qualities of fictional characters. So the public preferred to see Vera Kholodnaya, a respectable mother and wife, as a victim of fatal passions.

Perhaps the greatest number of legends are associated with the death of the actress. According to one of them, Vera Kholodnaya never hid her “red” views and was poisoned on the orders of Denikin’s counterintelligence. Moreover, she was poisoned in the best traditions of the cinema of those years - poisonous white lilies. According to another version, everything was exactly the opposite - it was not the whites who were persecuting, but the reds because Kholodnaya “worked for the enemy and wanted to flee the country.”

In favor of the first version, the memories of Kholodnaya’s sister, Sophia, are usually cited, who made her sister’s dream come true - she became a ballerina, took her last name and danced at the Odessa Opera House until the end of the 1930s. The memoirs were written in the 1950s, and the image that Sophia painted in them may have been far from reality, but, given the era, “ideologically correct.”

In addition, they were a kind of response to the Ukrainian writer Yuri Smolich, who in the novel “Dawn over the Sea” (published in 1955) made Vera the mistress of the French consul in Odessa. At the end of the book, Vera recognizes the truth of the Bolsheviks and saves Kotovsky, which becomes the indirect cause of her death. Another implausible fact, which over time turned from artistic fiction into a “rumor,” is Vera Kholodnaya’s affair with the famous Odessa bandit Mishka Yaponchik. In the late 1960s, Grigory Plotkin’s play “At Dawn” was popular; it was also based on a fairly popular operetta, and Vera Kholodnaya, according to the plot, danced the tango with Mishka Yaponchik (one of the actress’s famous films was called “The Last Tango”) and was going to emigrate to Paris.

The daughters of Vera Kholodnaya, who by that time were already in America (the actress’s second sister Nadezhda took them first to Constantinople and then to California), had a different opinion about their mother’s political views. And admitting at the height of McCarthyism that your mother was an ardent communist was “bad form.”

Russian silent film actress Vera Kholodnaya. Two pre-revolutionary postcards

According to various sources, over the four years of her career, Vera Kholodnaya starred in more than 50 films; according to other sources, there were more than 80 of them. Only five of them have survived: “Mirages” (1915) and “Be Still, Sadness, Be Still” (1918) by Pyotr Chardynin, “Children of the Century” and “Life for a Life” (1916) by Evgeniy Bauer, and “The Last Tango” (1918 ) Vyacheslav Viskovsky (only partially preserved).

“...I loved cinema since childhood, was fond of comic films and idolized Asta Nielsen (Danish silent film actress - editor's note), but I did not think about a cinematic career. I was preparing to be a dancer, dreaming of the stage. But I got married early, and this blocked my path to the stage.”

Vera Kholodnaya, Vladimir Maksimov and Vitold Polonsky in the film “By the Fireplace” (1917).

For contemporaries, the image she created on the screen was the personification of the Silver Age, decadence - a languid beauty, close to the fatal line. The first critics wrote about her performance: “... the slightest shades of feeling are conveyed truthfully and talentedly,” but their Soviet colleagues thought exactly the opposite: “a beautiful, but inexpressive actress, performer of the roles of a woman-doll, a woman-toy, a passive victim of other people’s passions and unfortunates.” accidents."

Her roles, in the opinion of a modern sophisticated viewer, were indeed of the same type. So, in the film “Children of the Century” she played the wife of a poor bank employee who rejects the claims of a rich businessman. But the insidious seducer arranges the dismissal of her husband, and, frightened by poverty, the heroine still leaves her family.

Pre-revolutionary postcards with actress Vera Kholodnaya. Left: Vera Kholodnaya and Vladimir Maximov in the film “By the Fireplace.” Right: Vera Kholodnaya in the film “Dear Love’s Tale”

Their 1916 collaboration with Bauer, “A Life for a Life,” was a stunning success with viewers. After this film, Vera Kholodnaya was given the nickname “queen of the screen”: according to one version, it was invented by Alexander Vertinsky, who was a close friend of the Kholodny family. The plot of the film is as follows: the millionaire Khromova has two daughters - her own Musya and her adopted Nata, who was played by Kholodnaya. Nata begins an affair with Prince Bartinsky, but he marries her sister for money. Nata, in revenge, marries businessman Zhukov. A year later, Nata and the prince resume their romance, but the story ends, as one would expect, tragically: the prince squanders his wife’s fortune, gets mired in debt, tries to shoot himself, but does not find the strength in himself, and then he is killed by the girls’ mother, passing it off as suicide .

In the film “Flame of the Sky” (not preserved), the heroine Kholodnaya again suffered from love, this time forbidden, and in the end the hero-lovers died from a lightning strike - punishment from heaven. In another surviving film, “Be Quiet, Sad, Be Quiet,” Kholodnaya appears in the image of a circus performer, Paula, who, tired of her impoverished life, becomes a kept woman. And in “The Last Tango” her heroine, dancer Clo, is killed by her former lover right during the dance.

Stills from the silent film “Last Tango”: Vera Kholodnaya and Ivan Khudoleev. Two pre-revolutionary postcards

Such images met the expectations of viewers at the beginning of the twentieth century to the same extent as the images of heroines of modern films - in stiletto heels with a machine gun at the ready, establishing law and justice in the absence of a strong male shoulder. “I love to death such novels, about such love that it boils like tar,” said the heroine of the already famous Soviet film “Chasing Two Hares,” which takes place approximately in the same period. The success of the heroines she played is understandable, only the wild popularity of Vera Kholodnaya is inexplicable, because among the actresses of that time there were more talented beauties in terms of acting. The only answer here can only be the words of the “queen of the screen” herself: “Cinematography is my element.”

Prepared by Natalya Popova

Photo by Vera Kholodnaya from the collection of Leonid Mileev, author of the website NemoeKINO.ru

Such different fans

When the time came to return to Moscow, the situation on the fronts of the Civil War had changed. The film crew had permission to travel from the Bolsheviks, but now they needed another permission: to travel through part of the lands occupied by whites. Only one person could give such accompanying paper: Colonel Freudenberg .

Realizing how much Kholodnaya depended on his decision, he tried to harass the actress. But Vera left his mansion in anger. Soon all of Odessa was talking about the fact that Freidenberg had been rejected, so no help could be expected from him.

It was then that Vera, out of despair, turned to Mishka Yaponchik. Mishka was probably the only fan of Vera who did not demand anything in return. He prepared a plan for the escape of Vera and her family from Odessa.

Fatal lilies

In Nikita Mikhalkov’s film “Slave of Love,” Olga Voznesenskaya, whose prototype was Kholodnaya, was played by Elena Solovey.
Still from the film On the evening of February 8, 1919, Vera was working in the theater at a charity concert, after which she was supposed to meet with Yaponchik to discuss an escape plan. During intermission, she entered the dressing room and saw a huge bouquet of lilies. The actress pressed the flowers to her face and then saw a card with the name of Colonel Freudenberg inserted into the bouquet.

A few moments later, Vera began to choke and lost consciousness. Rumors spread throughout Odessa that Vera had been poisoned. Freidenberg tried to spread the news through newspapers that Vera had a severe flu, but no one believed it.

Funeral of Vera Kholodnaya. Photo: wikipedia.org

Vera Kholodnaya: biography, family

The “Queen of the Screen” was born in Poltava in August 1893. From the biography of Vera Kholodnaya it follows that she was born into an intelligent family. Her parents were literature teacher Vasily Levchenko and graduate of the Institute of Noble Maidens Ekaterina Sleptsova. Sophia and Nadezhda were the names of the actress’s younger sisters.

The first years of Vera's life were spent in Moscow, where the family moved shortly after her birth. Her childhood was not easy. The girl lost her father early, who died of cholera. She was forced to take care of her sick mother and younger sisters.

Virus or poisoning?

On the evening of February 16, a week later, Vera died. What killed the greatest actress of the time: flu or poison? An autopsy was not performed, so it is impossible to find out what really happened. Of course, modern technology could help find out the truth, but the body was lost when the cemetery was ravaged in 1932.

Vera’s sister, daughter and mother returned to Moscow a week later. Then Vladimir learned about his wife’s death. The news shocked the man so much that he locked himself in his office for several days, talked to the portrait of Vera and asked for his forgiveness. Vladimir was never able to survive the death of his beloved woman. He died three months after Vera. According to another version, he was nevertheless shot by the Bolsheviks.

Personal life

At the graduation party at the gymnasium, Vera met a young lawyer, Vladimir Kholodny, whom she soon married. The couple had a daughter, Evgenia, and they also took in a girl, Nonna, who was left without parents.

Vladimir took part in the First World War and was awarded the title of hero, but, like his wife, he died early. Actually, he outlived Vera by only a few months: Kholodny was arrested and shot by security officers, which gave rise to many speculations about the death of the actress herself.

Vera Kholodnaya and her husband Vladimir

Vera Kholodnaya’s daughters were taken in by her younger sister and emigrated from Russia with them. It is known that Nonna became an opera singer, lived in France and America, and Evgenia traveled all over the world with her husband, a master of sociology. Both daughters repeatedly gave interviews in which they spoke very warmly about their parents.