Yelizaveta Uvarova

Biography

Before the Revolution stole the limelight, a Muscovite named Yelizaveta Uvarova had already slipped herself into film history three times over. In 1909 she stepped before the camera for The Death of Ivan the Terrible, resurrecting sixteenth-century intrigue in the earliest chapter of Russian feature-length storytelling. Four years later audiences caught her amid the fragrant black-and-white petals of How Lovely, How Fresh Those Roses Were, and by 1915 she was braving Dionysus’ Anger, trading tsars for pagan gods in one of pre-Soviet cinema’s boldest leaps.