Mariya Germanova

Biography

Mariya Germanova first drew breath in Moscow, 1884, while the city still answered to the Romanovs. Before the century turned she had stepped onto the boards, and by 1914 she had become the face of Tolstoy’s doomed heroine in Anna Karenina. A year later she slipped into the tormented skin of Ekaterina Ivanovna, and in 1924 she faced the camera once more for the German silent film Die Macht der Finsternis. Exile eventually carried her westward; she closed her final act in Paris on 9 April 1940.