WHY POLA NEGRI CHANGED HER NAME

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 288, 25 February 1928, Page 23

WHY POLA NEGRI CHANGED HER NAME

ROMANTIC TEMPERAMENT A VIVID IMPRESSION T-XERE is a vividly written ! impression by an American t writer of Pola Negri. I Picture-goers perhaps may not know that Pola changed her name from Appolonia Chalupez to Pola Xegri after I reading the verses of the I Italian poet, Ada Xegri. ; Her latest picture. “Barbed I Wire,” was recently shown in | Auckland.

Pola Xegri, impulsive, fiery, imaginative, violent, graceful, vital, has mirrored to us through “A Woman

3f the World,” “The | Spanish Dancer/’ ! ‘Flower of the | Night,” and other entertaining motion pictures the attractiveness of her temperament. We have enjoyed it. But when she strives to live that creative life, which is honestly she, we hedge, protest and are intolerant, so that when an announcement of her marriage to Prince Serge Mdivani was cabled from Paris, newspaper reports enumerate her various love affairs. Her first husband was Count Eugene Dompska, a Pole. They were divorced before she came to this country. Soon after her arrival here it was rumoured that she would be married to Charlie Chaplin; the comedian married Lita Gray. When Rudolph Valentino was stricken with fatal illness, Pola Negri announced that she was engaged to the famous motion-picture actor. She attended the funeral as the principal mourner. In 1925 Miss Negri was fined 10,000 dollars and compelled to pay an additional 47,000 dollars for bringing into the country jewels without paying duty on them. The prince she married is a brother of Prince David Mdivani, who married Mae Murray, in California. The Creative Artist The very change of her name from Appolonia Chalupez, much more euphonious than Pola Negri, is ominously the result of a sensitive impression As a child this Polish romanticist had read and reread the translation of the Italian verses of Ada Negri, and they made such a marked impression upon her childish fancy that when she had to choose a shorter surname she followed her infantile fancy and selected that of Negri. However, she attended school until she was 16 years old and then went to Warsaw and there entered a dramatic school, completing a three-year course in one year. As soon as she was graduated she was offered an opportunity to appear in the leading role of “Sodom’s End,”

a play written by Hermann Sudermann and produced in Warsaw. Until the German invasion interrupted theatrical productions, she continued appearing in successful plays, an encouraging reception in the pantomime role of “Sumurun” convinced her that she could act without the assistance of spoken words. She raised enough money to produce a motion picture, “Love and Passion,” which she herself wrote and directed and in which she played the leading role. There were more weaknesses about the amateur film than good points, but the same theatrical showmanship that won for her an engagement by the UFA Film Company, to play the leading role in “Du Barry,” and subsequently offers from American film companies, was later vividly characterised in her part as the heavily veiled chief mourner at Valentino’s funeral. Pola Xegri shuns interviews: there are few to whom she will speak. If you would enjoy her for what she gives you, then see her as she is, tempestuous, volatile, fiery, theatrical, wholly herself.

JOAN CRAWFORD’S CAREER

Joan Crawford, beautiful M.G.M. featured player, furnishes another striking example of the amazing success that brains and talent can win in modern motion pictures. After first winning prominence in ‘Sally, Irene, and Mary,” Miss Crawford received a number of minor roles, and was then featured in “The Understanding Heart,” “The Taxi Dancer,” “Winners of the Wilderness.” and “The Unknown,” with Lon Chaney, and “Spring Fever” opposite William Haines. She was then cast for the prize role of the current season, the name part in M.G.M.’s production of “Rose Marie.” Now comes news that she will be the featured feminine lead in “The Argonauts,” Peter B. Kyne’s story of the Californian gold rush -days,, which M.G.M. will shortly produce as a Cosmopolitan production under the direction of Jack Conway. __