Elissa Landi

Elissa Landi, born Elisabeth Marie Christine von Kühnelt on December 6, 1904, in Venice, Italy, was an Austrian-American actress whose career spanned stage, screen, and literature. Her father was Austrian Richard Kühnelt, and her mother was Caroline, later known as Countess Caroline Zanardi Landi. Landi spent her early childhood in the village of Kleinhart in Lower Austria, near Vienna, before her parents divorced. She subsequently received her education in England. She claimed descent from Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary. She appeared on Broadway from 1930 to 1944 and built a parallel career in Hollywood films throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

Landi's ambitions initially centered on writing rather than performance. She completed her first novel at approximately nineteen or twenty years of age and continued producing fiction throughout her acting career. Her stage debut came in 1923 with Dandy Dick, after which she joined the Oxford Repertory Company. In 1926 she starred in Dorothy Brandon's Blind Alley in the West End. During the 1920s she worked in British, French, and German films before making her Broadway debut in A Farewell to Arms in 1930. Her Broadway career also encompassed Tapestry in Gray, The Lady Has a Heart, Empress of Destiny, Apology, and the melodrama Dark Hammock, among other productions.

Fox Film Corporation signed Landi to a contract in 1931, pairing her with leading men including David Manners, Charles Farrell, Warner Baxter, and Ronald Colman in romantic dramas. That same year she appeared in Body and Soul, which also featured Humphrey Bogart, and starred in The Yellow Ticket alongside Laurence Olivier, Lionel Barrymore, and Boris Karloff, directed by Raoul Walsh. The film, based on Michael Morton's 1914 play, centered on a young Jewish woman who obtains a prostitute's passport to travel through Czarist Russia to reach her ailing father. In 1932, Fox loaned her to Paramount, where Cecil B. DeMille cast her as Mercia, the female lead in The Sign of the Cross. She went on to star opposite Robert Donat in the box office success The Count of Monte Cristo in 1934. Fox cancelled her contract in 1936 after she declined a particular role. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer subsequently signed her, and she appeared in After the Thin Man that same year, playing the cousin of Myrna Loy's character.

Landi became a naturalized United States citizen in 1943 and retired from acting that year, having completed only two additional films following her MGM period. She dedicated the remainder of her life to writing, publishing six novels and a collection of poems. She was married twice: to John Cecil Lawrence from 1928 to 1936, and to Curtis Kinney Thomas from 1943 until her death. Landi died of cancer on October 21, 1948, in Kingston, New York, at the age of 43. She was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Newburyport, Massachusetts. She holds a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to motion pictures, located at 1611 Vine Street.