Modern Screen (Jan - Nov 1940)

BLONDES! MEET THE (Continued from page 6) back like magic, utterly fascinated. In the foyer she puffs nonchalantly at a cigarette stuck in a long holder. Now and then she'll do a solo performance right there in her seat. For instance, at the opening of the summer ballet season, during the unraveling of a picturesque sequence involving a witch and a Slavic Red Riding Hood, Madame portrayed so realistic a witch, writhing and twisting and leering, that the woman to the left of her actually shuddered! Unbelievable but true — Ouspenskaya (in Russia it's quite Emily Post to call a lady by her last name) is also a horsewoman! But par excellence. At the first sign of a half day off from her thousand and one chores, she is chauffeured (she abominates driving an automobile; speed laws make her champ at the bit) to her ranch near Victorville. Here, without a care in the world, romps her high-spirited mare, Queenie. By the time she's in her togs, red ribbon in her hair, Queenie is saddled. With no groom to lift her into the saddle, Madame takes off. Even Gene Autry thinks she does it with mirrors. She's weary of playing the eternal eccentric, if vivid, old lady, be she countess, maharanee or ballet mistress. Madame is furious at unimaginative producers. They can only see her in the last role. They swear that's the real Ouspenskaya. Let her tell it: "I want to do something gay and youthful for a change — musical comedy!" she protests. By all odds Madame has this favor coming to her. She's been playing antique women ever since she first hit the deck. Amusingly enough, as a stagestruck little maiden of 14, she made her first appearance on any stage (mostly before kinsmen, friends and muzhiks attached to her father's estate) in the role of a 60-year-old professor. Her cousin Fred, 13, played her 40-year-old spinster daughter. That was all back in Tula, a famed Russian provincial city where Maria Ouspenskaya was born, the daughter of a brilliant lawyer. She was thirteen when her father died. He had been dead two years when financial reverses hit the house of Ouspensky (Ouspenskaya is the feminine form, of course.) Maria, fresh from the equivalent of what we know here as high school, set about making something of herself. Endowed with a coloratura voice, "more than mediocre and less than sensational," she decided to conquer the concert stage. Thanks to a kindly uncle, she managed to get in a year at the Warsaw conservatory, but then he too lost his money, and she was forced to withdraw. It almost broke her heart. But not her spirit. Back to Tula she went to become a lowly governess. Of herself at this time she says: "In the wake of the set-back to my dreams, I found myself becoming more gloomy, my temperament more restrained. Suddenly I remembered the fever of youth when the stage loomed like something enchanting in my dreams. I recalled my makeshift apprenticeship in the drama. Then and there I decided to risk everything and go to Moscow. Somehow, I knew I would manage." The gods were with her. Almost at the end of her rope, she landed a job as soloist at one of the Moscow churches. Fired with a faith in herself as an actress, she simultaneously enrolled at Adasheff's School of Drama where she negotiated the three-year regimen with colors flying. In her mind was one goal — membership in the celebrated Moscow Art Theatre, where Constantine Stanislavsky was exciting the world's wonder with his revolutionary dramatic ideas. Eager but humble, she determined to round out her experience by a two-year trick with stock. It was hardly exciting, or pleasant, this wandering over the Russian provinces, putting up with a thousand inconveniences. But it convinced her she was on the right track. At last sure of herself, she applied for membership in the Art Theatre. She received an audition in due time, as did 250 other applicants that month. She was one of five selected. She never wanted to be a leading lady. Her ambition was to become a fine character actress. How she established herself within a few seasons as one of the most distinguished performers in the Russian theatre is too well-known to need repetition here. Consequently, when Stanislavsky took his illustrious group to America in 1922, she made the trip. She fell in love with this country from the start. She wept at leaving it. When the Art Theatre paid a return visit in 1924, she stayed. Together with the late Richard Boleslavsky, the gifted actor, author and director, she formed the American Laboratory Theatre to teach the Stanislavsky method. When it closed in 1929, she opened the Maria Ouspenskaya School of Dramatic Art. It was a success from the start. Remembering her own struggles, she made the tuition nominal and set up so many scholarships that her business manager began warning her of bankruptcy. She would shrug and say: "Is that so important?" From the Ouspenskaya School has emerged some of the screen's finest talent. Garfield will tell you point-blank that Madame's second to nobody. Eddie Albert brings a script around to her every time he gets a part. Together they go over the story, trying to breathe life into the character Albert, ever the perfectionist, has been assigned. Warner's soaring star, Brenda Marshall, learned the three R's of drama under Madame. Paramount's Lillian Cornell ("Rhythm on the River") is another Ouspenskaya pupil. So is Anne Baxter, who's just done a good job in "The Great Profile" with Mr. John Barrymore. Madame turned down Joan Crawford and Katie Hepburn as private pupils. With her it's a democratic business. You learn acting en masse. In Hollywood, Ouspenskaya would be wondrously happy were it not that the real stage is 3,000 miles away. She does her best in the film Babylon by attending every worthy play. Does she sigh for the Russia that was? Not at all. 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