Elena Miramova

Elena Miramova (27 May 1901 – 8 July 1992) was a Russian-born American actress and playwright whose Broadway career spanned from 1931 to 1943. Born in Tsaritsyn, Russian Empire — the city now known as Volgograd — she emigrated to New York City accompanied by a brother who died when she was eleven years old. To support herself, she worked in a nightgown factory until a theatrically inclined wealthy family took an interest in her and helped finance her education.

Her path to the stage was shaped significantly by Samuel James Hume, a former director of the Arts and Crafts Theatre in Detroit who went on to direct the Berkeley Greek Theatre in 1918. Hume recognized Miramova's attraction to performance but concluded that her Russian accent would restrict her theatrical prospects. In 1922 he directed her to the experimental Cornish School in Seattle, where she studied acting and worked to refine her speech. During her time there she came to live with the school's founder and director, Nellie Cornish, who later adopted her. The Cornish School also brought her into contact with Russian singer and director Vladimir Rosing, who visited to teach a four-week master class; their association continued across New York, London, and California. Miramova subsequently married producer Frederic Theodore Rolbein and traveled through Europe with him, building a reputation through performances in England and on the continent.

Her stage work in London during the early 1930s established her as a notable presence in British theatre. She played Bianca in the play Anatol at London's Lyceum Theatre from 16 January 1931 to February 1931, a production that received mixed reviews. Later that same year, when actress Eugenie Leontovich fell ill and temporarily left the cast of Grand Hotel at the Adelphi Theatre, Miramova stepped into the lead role for three weeks. Her portrayal of the Russian ballerina Grusinskaya drew praise, with one notice describing it as outstanding and another calling it a thing of sheer beauty. In 1932 she appeared at the Garrick Theatre in F. L. Lucas's The Bear Dances, playing Vera Levine, a young idealist set against a Soviet backdrop. The Stage praised her performance as impassioned and spirited, and the production was noted as the first dramatization of the Soviets on the West End stage.

After her husband died, Miramova returned to New York, where her pronounced Russian accent confined her largely to Continental roles and complicated her career. She later recalled being barred from a hotel room for non-payment while in rehearsal. Despite these difficulties, she continued working steadily. She appeared as Theodora in the comedy Theodora, the Quean — the word quean denoting a harlot — which ran for five performances beginning 31 January 1934 at Philadelphia's Forrest Theatre. In September 1934 she performed in Short Story in Scarborough, New York, and the following year played Marianne Pentland in the drama Times Have Changed, which ran from 25 February 1935 into March of that year. In May 1937 she appeared in the comedy Tovarich at the Ann Arbor Festival in Michigan, and that August she starred in Lucrezia Borgia, which opened on 9 August 1937 at the Wharf Theatre in Provincetown. By the time she took the role of Mrs. Carroll in The Two Mrs. Carrolls at Pittsburgh's Nixon Theatre later in 1937, she had already performed the play extensively in London. In July 1938 she appeared briefly in Fata Morgana in Ogunquit, Maine, and in April 1941 she participated in the Berkeley Theatre Festival. Her Broadway credit Close Quarters, a two-person show, opened on 6 March 1939 at the John Golden Theatre in New York and ran for six performances.

Dissatisfied with the limitations placed on her career and drawn to exploring the Russian character, Miramova resolved around 1940 to write a play that would provide fitting roles for herself and two fellow Russian-American actresses. Working in collaboration with Eugenie Leontovich — the same actress whose illness had briefly given Miramova her Grand Hotel opportunity in 1931 — she wrote the comedy Dark Eyes and brought the script to producer Ben Hecht. The play went into production in 1942, premiered in January 1943, and ran for six months at the Belasco Theatre in New York. In March 1943, Warner Brothers purchased the film rights for $250,000, though the planned film was never produced. In the play, Miramova portrayed the character Tonia Karpova. During a 1943 interview with The New York Times, she described both herself and Tonia as not a plate of sex appeal, but kind, metaphysical, and trying very hard to keep a belief in God. Around 1944 she began work on a second comedy, centered on a mother and daughter, but the project was apparently never completed.

In May 1945, Miramova married army captain Byron Carr Moore in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. No further theatrical activity has been documented after this point. During the winter of 1946–47, she accompanied her husband to Iceland, where he had been engaged by the newly founded Icelandic airline Loftleiðir to train its first pilots. Over the course of that year, Miramova became a regular visitor to the home of writer Halldór Laxness, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955, and gave at least one private reading of a new play at his house. Laxness's wife Auður later wrote warmly of Miramova in her memoirs, describing her as one of those enchanting women one can never forget. Elena Miramova Moore died in Ventura, California on 8 July 1992, at the age of ninety-one.