Olga Petrova

Olga Petrova, born Ellen Constance Muriel Harding on 10 May 1884 in Portsea, Hampshire, England, was a British-American actress, playwright, and screenwriter whose Broadway career spanned from 1911 to 1927. Her father, Herbert Harding, worked as a municipal tax collector, and the family relocated shortly after her birth to Tuebrook, Liverpool, where she was raised and where her younger siblings were born. She died on 30 November 1977 in Clearwater, Florida, at the age of 93, having had no children.

Harding left home after finding her father's strict household stifling. Her memoir describes a period working as a governess before she moved to London to pursue a stage career. She adopted the name and persona of Madame Olga Petrova, presenting herself as a glamorous Russian or Polish actress — a choice that may have been her own, though later publicity attributed it to a producer capitalizing on the contemporary vogue for elegant Russian performers such as Anna Pavlova. Throughout her life, Petrova maintained a corresponding accent, even in private, and insisted she had been born in Warsaw, Poland. Her first notable appearance under the Petrova name came at the London Pavilion in April 1911, and that success led directly to an engagement at the Folies-Bergere cabaret in New York. She arrived in New York in mid-1911 and later that year took a leading role in the Broadway musical comedy The Quaker Girl before returning to vaudeville. By 1912, Variety described her performance at the Fifth Avenue Theatre as one of the cleverest and most attractive turns on the bill.

In 1913, while performing in Indianapolis, Indiana, Petrova met local physician John Dillon Stewart, and the two married that year in Kansas City. Stewart subsequently relocated his medical practice to New York City to remain near her primary base of operations. Petrova returned to theatrical performance in 1914 and was soon offered a film contract. Her screen debut came in The Tigress, directed by Alice Guy-Blaché, and she went on to appear in more than two dozen silent films through 1917, working primarily for Solax Studios and Metro Pictures, where she was frequently cast as a femme fatale. Dissatisfied with passive female roles and with the idle time film production required, she established her own film company and wrote scripts for several of her pictures. Among her films, she regarded those directed by Maurice Tourneur as her finest work, though most of her filmography is now lost. The Library of Congress Silent Feature Film Database confirms that three titles survive: The Vampire (1915), Extravagance (1916), and The Waiting Soul (1918).

Both on stage and screen, Petrova became known for her commitment to portraying independent, strong-willed women. In 1918 she stated that the only women she wished to play were women who act and think for themselves, and she wrote of her preference for characters she described as modern, quick-thinking, and wholly human. She left the film industry in 1918 and resumed stage work, including multiple performances at the Palace Theatre in New York. During the 1920s she wrote three plays in which she also starred: The White Peacock, published in 1922; Hurricane, published in 1924, which addressed the subject of birth control; and What Do We Know?, published in 1930, which dealt with spiritualism. She also toured the United States with a theater troupe and returned successfully to vaudeville in 1923. On paid assignment for publications including Shadowland magazine, Motion Picture Magazine, and Photoplay Journal, she conducted interviews with prominent film figures of the era, among them Marion Davies, Mary Pickford, Theda Bara, Alla Nazimova, Norma Talmadge, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and Rudolf Valentino.

At the height of her fame, Petrova made several visits to Saranac Lake, New York at the invitation of theatrical agent William Morris. In the summer of 1921 she turned the first shovel of earth for a chamber of commerce housing project on a lot donated by Walter Jenkins on Lake Street. Both Petrova Avenue and the Petrova School in Saranac Lake bear her name. She retired to the south of France in the late 1920s, but returned to the United States at the outset of World War II and settled in Clearwater, Florida, with her second husband, Louis Willoughby. In 1942 she published her autobiography, Butter with My Bread. Petrova holds a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.