Pola Negri

Weaving together universal themes of family, geography, and death with images of America's frontier landscape, former Kentucky Poet Laureate Joe Survant has been lauded for his ability to capture the spirit of the land and its people. Kliatt magazine has praised his work, stating, "Survant's words sing.... This is storytelling at its best." Exploring the pre-Columbian and frontier history of the commonwealth, The Land We Dreamed is the final installment in the poet's trilogy on rural Kentucky. The poems in the book feature several well-known figures and their stories, reimagining Dr. Thomas Walker's naming of the Cumberland Plateau, Mary Draper Ingles's treacherous journey from Big Bone Lick to western Virginia following her abduction by Native Americans, and Daniel Boone's ruminations on the fall season of 1770. Survant also explores the Bluegrass from the perspectives of the chiefs of the Shawnee and Seneca tribes. Drawing on primary documents such as the seventeenth-century reports of French Jesuit missionaries, excerpts from the Draper manuscripts, and the journals of pioneers George Croghan and Christopher Gist, this collection surveys a broad and under-recorded history. Poem by poem, Survant takes readers on an imaginative expedition -- through unspoiled Shawnee cornfields, down the wild Ohio River, and into the depths of the region's ancient coal seams.

Pola Negri, born Apollonia Chapulek in Poland, was a singer, stage and film actress who achieved worldwide fame during the silent and golden eras of Hollywood and European film for her tragedienne and femme fatale roles. Her career on stage began in 1913, but as WWI devastated those venues, she relocated to Germany, to become a star in silent films. American Director Adolph Zukor lured her to Paramount in 1921, for one of her most productive decades. She married glamorously, to Polish Count Eugene Dambski and Georgian Prince Serge Mdivani, but her liaisons were even more fabulous: Charles Chaplin, millionaires Wolfgang George Schleber (German) and Glen Kidston (British), but it was the great Latin lover Rudolph Valentino who won her lasting regard, despite only one year of happiness. This book is her story of her storied life.

Femme fatale Pola Negri (1897-1987) was one of the great stars of the silent film era, an actress whose personal story of hardships and successes, loves and tragedies is more compelling than most Hollywood dramas. Yet today she is largely overlooked, her name tarnished by myths and scandals. Taking a fresh look at her life and career, this book debunks the myths and gossip, presenting a candid portrait of one of the silent screen's most sensational leading ladies. Rare photographs are included, along with in-depth discussions of her films.

Pola Negri (1897--1987) rose from an impoverished childhood in Warsaw, Poland, to become one of early Hollywood's greatest stars. After tuberculosis ended her career as a ballerina in 1912, she turned to acting and worked under legendary directors Max Reinhardt and Ernst Lubitsch in Germany. Negri preceded Lubitsch to Hollywood, where she quickly became a fan favorite thanks to her beauty, talent, and diva personality. Known for her alluring sexuality and biting artistic edge, she starred in more than sixty films and defined the image of the cinematic femme fatale. Author Mariusz Kotowski brings the screen siren's story to English-speaking audiences for the first time in this fascinating biography. At the height of her fame, Negri often portrayed exotic and mysterious temptresses, headlining in such successes as The Spanish Dancer (1923) and Forbidden Paradise (1924), before returning to Europe in the 1930s. The devastating effects of World War II soon drove her back to the United States, where she starred in Hi Diddle Diddle (1943) and pursued her vaudeville career before retiring from the entertainment industry. Kotowski also illuminates Negri's dramatic personal life, detailing her numerous love affairs -- including her engagement to Charlie Chaplin and her romance with Rudolph Valentino -- as well as her multiple marriages. This long-overdue biography not only paints a detailed portrait of one classic Hollywood's most intriguing stars and the film industry's original Jezebel, but also explores the link between Hollywood and European cinema during the interwar years.

Her films were silent. She wasn't. Meet POLA NEGRI, the glamorous "vamp" who took Hollywood by storm in the Roaring Twenties. Already renowned in Europe for her acting talent, beauty, and passion, Negri quickly made her mark in dramatic black and white, both onscreen and off. Vivid. Wild. Threatening. Gorgeous. Exotic. Temperamental. Pola Negri was called all that, and more. Love affairs with Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, and a self-styled prince-and equally tempestuous relationships with colleagues, critics, the press, and the fans-kept Negri in the front page news. She wouldn't have had it any other way. Tony Villecco, author of the critically acclaimed Silent Stars Speak, shares his lifelong fascination with Negri. Features: 100+ photographs (several never before available to the public) Reminiscences from Negri's colleagues and acquaintances, including film historian Kevin Brownlow Filmography of Negri's work in American cinema, 1922-1964 Accounts from fan magazines, newspapers, other publications, and correspondence POLA NEGRI: THE HOLLYWOOD YEARS is not intended to be a complete historical retrospective or analysis of Pola Negri's films. Rather, it offers today's readers and film fans an intriguing glimpse into the life, times, and persona of a "silent" star who lived at full volume during the Golden Era of film.

Off-White Hollywood investigates how the 'ethnicity' of white European-American actresses has played a key role in the mythology of American identity and nation building. Negra focuses on key stars of the silent - Colleen Moore and Pola Negri - classical - Sonja Henie and Hedy Lamarr - and post-classical eras - Marisa Tomei and Cher - to demonstrate how each star illuminates aspects of ethnicity, gender, consumerism, and class at work in American culture.

From one of America's most renowned film scholars: a revelatory, perceptive, and highly readable look at the greatest silent film stars -- not those few who are fully appreciated and understood, like Chaplin, Keaton, Gish, and Garbo, but those who have been misperceived, unfairly dismissed, or forgotten. Here is Valentino, "the Sheik," who was hardly the effeminate lounge lizard he's been branded as; Mary Pickford, who couldn't have been further from the adorable little creature with golden ringlets that was her film persona; Marion Davies, unfairly pilloried in Citizen Kane; the original "Phantom" and "Hunchback," Lon Chaney; the beautiful Talmadge sisters, Norma and Constance. Here are the great divas, Pola Negri and Gloria Swanson; the great flappers, Colleen Moore and Clara Bow; the great cowboys, William S. Hart and Tom Mix; and the great lover, John Gilbert. Here, too, is the quintessential slapstick comedienne, Mabel Normand, with her Keystone Kops; the quintessential all-American hero, Douglas Fairbanks; and, of course, the quintessential all-American dog, Rin-Tin-Tin. This is the first book to anatomize the major silent players, reconstruct their careers, and give us a sense of what those films, those stars, and that Hollywood were all about. An absolutely essential text for anyone seriously interested in movies, and, with more than three hundred photographs, as much a treat to look at as it is to read.

Hollywood's Silent Closet provides a banquet of information about the pansexual intrigues of Hollywood between 1919 and 1926, compiled from eyewitness interviews with men and women, all of them insiders, who flourished in its midst. Not for the timid, it names names and doesn't spare the guilty. If you believe, like Truman Capote, that the literary treatment of gossip will become the literature of the 21st century, then you will love Hollywood's Silent Closet. Hollywood's Silent Closet is a vivid portrait of the decadent, homosexual, and gossipy world of pre-talkie Hollywood. It's an Info-Novel where 90% of everything in it is true. It represents the greatest collection of star-studded scandal ever assembled on the film stars of Hollywood's Silent Era. Valentino, Ramon Novarro, Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Pola Negri, Nazimova, and many others figure into eyewitness accounts of the debauched excesses that went on behind closed doors. It also documents the often tragic endings of America's first screen idols, some of whom admitted to being more famous than the monarchs of England and Jesus Christ combined. Many of the interviews that went into the compilation of this book were conducted between 1940 and 1974, as the subjects were nearing the end of their lives and were willing, at last, to reveal scandals and insights that had previously been repressed by their own fears and by the media machines of the studio system. Marriages of convenience are the norm as intra-male peccadillos (and lots of lesbian love, too) are swept under the potted palms of the Edwardian age. The hero of this tale is the amiably cross-dressing Durango Jones, a wide-eyed neophyte from Kansas, circa 1919, who hits Hollywood during its Pre-Code excesses, and stays for a sexual feast wherein the banquet consists of many of the era's most flamboyant sex symbols. And although technically, this title has been formatted as a novel rather than a straight-line biography, there's the sometimes disturbing sense that this book is genuinely historical as well as being a jolly and rollicking piece of very savvy entertainment. This is high-testosterone Hollywood at its most compulsively readable. The 60s didn't invent sex-the stars of the Silent Screen did. --Cruiser. Who slept with Mary Pickford's three husbands, her two brothers-in-law, and even her brother? The hero of Hollywood's Silent Closet, that's who! --Trova Roma.