Nicholas Dunaew
actor, miscellaneous, writer
- Birth name:
- Nicholas Alexander Dunay
- Born:
- 1884-05-22, Moscow, Russia
- Died:
- 1963, Washington, District of Columbia, USA
- Professions:
- actor, miscellaneous, writer
Biography
Moscow, 22 May 1884: the curtain rose on Nicholas Dunaew’s life. By 1914 he had traded the city’s frost for klieg lights, scripting and starring in “My Official Wife,” the first of three pictures that would keep his name on marquees from New York to Vladivostok. A decade later he trekked across “Siberia,” then detoured through the desert antics of “Two Arabian Knights,” sealing a silent-era résumé as adventurous as the plots he inhabited. Between takes he collected two leading ladies—Nina Byron, then Edith Donnerberg—both marriages off-screen dramas the press never quite decoded. The final fade-out came in 1963, not in Los Angeles or Moscow, but in Washington, D.C., where the man who once froze film frames in Cossack snowdrifts closed his last scene.
