I’m going to be profiling prolific influential women from the past under this new umbrella, Femme Fatale. I’ll be primarily looking at women from the early 1900′s through to the late 1960′s. Most of them will be film stars,artists, authors, muses, socialites and designers. If anyone has any requests, let me know!

First Femme Fatale is Polish born actress, Pola Negri.

Pola Negri  (1897 – 1987) was a Polish stage and film actress who achieved worldwide fame for her tragedienne and femme fatale roles from the 1910s through the 1940s during the Golden Era of Hollywood film. She was the first European film star to be invited to Hollywood, and became a great American star. She also started several important women’s fashion trends. She is known for being one of the most popular stars of the silent film era, and her varied career included work as an actress in silent and talking films, theater, and vaudeville; as a singer and recording artist; as an author; and as a ballerina.

Pola sings ‘Paradise’ in the 1932 film, A Woman Commands

Born Appolonia Chalupek, she was brought up by a single mother in a Warsaw slum. As a teenager, she trained at the Imperial Ballet School, debuted with the Imperial Ballet as a cygnet in Swan Lake, and danced in lead roles. She quit dancing after a bout with tuberculosis, then took up acting, which she studied at the Imperial Academy of Dramatic Arts in Warsaw. In 1913 she made her stage debut as an actress, and within a year she appeared in her first film. Soon she was a top screen star in Poland, prompting director Max Reinhardt to invite her to appear in his stage play Sumurun in Berlin; she remained there for five years, becoming internationally famous as the star of a number of major German films.

Bella Donna, 1923

Shadows of Paris, 1924

Flooded with contract offers from Hollywood, she moved to America in 1923 and signed with Paramount for $3000 a week; she thus became Hollywood’s first imported star. Her exotic, mysterious, passionate qualities caught on with American audiences, and she made numerous popular films; eventually her salary went up to $10,000 a week. She attracted a great deal of publicity for her offscreen romances and her long-term feud with rival Gloria Swanson. She divorced her husband, a Polish count, and made headlines with an engagement to Charlie Chaplin; she broke with Chaplin and took up with Rudolph Valentino, enhancing her sex-siren image.

Madame DuBarry, 1919

Valentino’s death in 1926 marked the beginning of her slip in popularity with the American public, which grew bored with her flamboyant exploits. With the advent of the sound era, she returned to Europe. From 1927-31 she was married to a Russian prince; she divorced him because he mismanaged her investments during the stock market crash. She became popular again in Germany after starring in several films there; she was ordered barred from films because she was thought to be part Jewish, but Adolf Hitler personally overruled this decision due to his fondness for the mother-love film Mazurka (1935), which he reportedly watched once a week for its tearjerking effects on him. It was rumoured that she and Hitler were romantically linked, but she successfully sued the French magazine that began the rumour.

Sappho, 1920

She settled on the French Riviera, then returned to the U.S. in 1941 after the Germans invaded France. In 1951 she became a U.S. citizen. After 1941 she appeared in only two additional films. She lived out the rest of her long life in well-off seclusion. She authored an autobiography, Pola Negri: Memoirs of a Star, before passing away in 1987.

Photograph by George Hurrell

“I consider my work great, as I am a great artist.” ~ Pola Negri

xx