1893–1919
Vira Kholodna
Film actress, “queen of the screen”
Audiences called her the “queen of the screen,” though her career lasted less than five years. Vira Kholodna from Poltava became one of the first great silent-film stars of the Russian Empire and died in Odesa at 25.
Key accomplishments
- One of the first great stars of silent cinema in the Russian Empire, the “queen of the screen”
- Dozens of film roles in 1914–1919
- Her breakthrough was Yevgeny Bauer’s film Song of Triumphant Love (1915)
- Surviving films include Children of the Age, Mirages and A Life for a Life
Where did the name “Kholodna” come from?
She was born Vira Levchenko, in 1893 in Poltava, the daughter of a literature teacher. She grew up in Moscow, where she went to a girls’ gymnasium and, briefly, to the Bolshoi Theatre’s ballet school. The surname that ended up on every film poster came from her husband, the lawyer Volodymyr Kholodnyi.
A star after one film
In 1914 Vira had a small part in the film Anna Karenina. The next year the director Yevgeny Bauer gave her the lead in Song of Triumphant Love, and that film made her a star. She worked at the Moscow studios of Aleksandr Khanzhonkov and later Dmitry Kharitonov, with Bauer, Pyotr Chardynin and Vladimir Gardin. In under five years dozens of films with her came out, mostly dramas and melodramas.
In the summer of 1918 Kharitonov’s troupe moved to Odesa. There Kholodna kept filming and performed at charity concerts. In early 1919 she caught the “Spanish flu,” the pandemic influenza, and died on 16 February. She was 25. She was buried at the First Christian Cemetery in Odesa, but the cemetery was destroyed in the 1930s and her grave has not survived.
A queen remembered through legends
Vira Kholodna was one of the first film stars in the modern sense. She was born and died in Ukraine, although she worked mostly in Moscow cinema. Only a few of her films survive, so today she is remembered more through legends than through her roles.
