Negri, Pola

(Apolonia Chałupiec, 1897-1987)

   One of the best-known stars of silent cinema, Negri started her career in Poland as a dancer and a theatrical actress. In a series of unsophisticated but popular melodramas produced by the studio Sfinks, beginning with The Slave of Sin (aka Love and Passion, Niewolnica zmysłów, 1914, Jan Pawłowski), Negri created a Polish femme fatale who seduces and then destroys her lovers. Playing aggressive, caricatured women, Negri sealed her popularity with a series of melodramas made by Sfinks in 1917, known as The Mysteries of Warsaw, such as Arabella, His Last Deed (Jego ostatni czyn) and Room Number 13 (Pokój nr 13), which referred to real-life Warsaw criminal activity and erotic affairs. Thanks to her role in the pantomime Sumurun, produced in 1913 by Ryszard Ordyński for a Warsaw theater, Negri moved in 1917 to Berlin to play the same character in Max Reinhardt's stage production. Between 1917 and 1922, she starred in twenty-three German films. Her career accelerated after she met Ernst Lubitsch, who directed her in three internationally famous films: Carmen (1918), Madame DuBarry (aka Passion, 1919), and Sumurun (1920), which enabled her to move with him to Hollywood. In the 1920s, she starred in several Hollywood films directed by, among others, Lubitsch (Forbidden Paradise, 1924), Raoul Walsh (East of Suez, 1925), Dimitri Buchowetzki (Lily of the Dust, 1924, The Crown of Lies, 1926), Mauritz Stiller (HotelImperial, 1927, The Woman on Trial, 1927), and Rowland V. Lee (Three Sinners, 1928, Loves of an Actress, 1928). At the beginning of the 1930s, after appearing in her first sound film, A Woman Commands (1932, Paul L. Stein), Negri moved back to Germany where she starred in films such as Mazurka (1935, Willi Frost) and Madame Bovary (1937, Gerhard Lamprecht). In 1941 Negri returned to America. In 1964 she appeared in her last film, The Moon Spinners, directed by James Neilson. Details from Negri's life can be found in her 1970 autobiographical book, Memoirs of a Star.

   Historical Dictionary of Polish Cinema by Marek Haltof