Stacia Napierkowska

Biography

A winter child of 1886, Stacia Napierkowska first drew breath in Paris on December 16 and, decades later, exhaled her last there on 11 May 1945. Between those two dates she built a career that flickered across early-cinema screens like a blue-white match: she bewitched audiences as the panther-like Irma Vep in Louis Feuillade’s crime serial Les Vampires (1915), turned myth into celluloid with The Marriage of Psyche and Cupid (1913), and later stepped behind the camera to direct the surreal mystery Missing Husbands (1921). Actress, filmmaker, and perpetual Parisian—she never stopped inventing new ways to haunt the frame.