Maria Ouspenskaya

Maria Ouspenskaya was a Russian actress and acting teacher born on 29 July 1876 in Tula, Russia. She pursued her early training in Warsaw, where she studied singing, and in Moscow, where she studied acting. She became a founding member of the First Studio, a theatre studio of the Moscow Art Theatre, where she trained under Konstantin Stanislavsky and his assistant Leopold Sulerzhitsky.

When the Moscow Art Theatre toured to New York City in 1922, Ouspenskaya chose to remain in the United States. She went on to perform on Broadway from 1923 to 1943, appearing in productions that included the drama Daughters of Atreus, the play The Passing Present, Abide With Me, Outrageous Fortune, and the comedy The Taming of the Shrew. Alongside her stage work, she taught acting at the American Laboratory Theatre, counting Lee Strasberg among her students. In 1929, she co-founded the School of Dramatic Art in New York City with Richard Boleslawski, her former colleague from the Moscow Art Theatre. Anne Baxter, then an unknown teenager, was among the students who trained at the school.

Financial difficulties at the school eventually led Ouspenskaya to pursue work in Hollywood. Around the same time, she opened the Maria Ouspenskaya School of Dance on Vine Street in Los Angeles, where Marge Champion, who served as the model for Disney's Snow White, was among her pupils. Despite her pronounced Russian accent, she secured film roles by playing European characters of varied national backgrounds. Her first Hollywood role came in Dodsworth in 1936, which earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and made her the first Russian actress to receive an Oscar nomination. She earned a second nomination in the same category for Love Affair in 1939.

Ouspenskaya appeared in a number of films during the early 1940s, including the World War II dramas The Mortal Storm, directed by Frank Borzage, and The Man I Married, produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, both released in 1940. She also appeared in The Rains Came, Waterloo Bridge, Beyond Tomorrow, Dance Girl Dance, Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, and Kings Row. Among her most recognized later roles was Maleva, an elderly Romani fortuneteller, which she portrayed in the horror films The Wolf Man in 1941 and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man in 1943, both featuring Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi.

Ouspenskaya died on 3 December 1949, several days after sustaining severe burns in a house fire reportedly caused by falling asleep while smoking a cigarette, which followed a stroke. She was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale. A biographical film about her life, She-Wolf in Hollywood: The Story of Maria Ouspenskaya, drawing on materials from her archives at UCLA, was released in 2024.