Alla Nazimova

Her contribution to the film industry has been recognized through a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. An irony: Betsy's brother's widow married the older brother of the Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington. Alla Nazimova died in 1945 in Los Angeles and was interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. She is buried in the Green Mount Cemetery, Baltimore, Maryland. With little choice, she gave up on the film industry, returning to perform on Broadway until the early 1940s when she appeared in a few more films, ostensibly in need of money. Betsy returned to Baltimore with her son, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte. By 1925 she no longer could afford to invest in more films and financial backers withdrew their support. Jerome gave in to his brother, returned to the French Navy and married a German princess.

However, her creativity did not meet consumer tastes and the films lost a great deal of money. She gave birth to a son in 1805, in London. Daring for the times, in her adaptations of works by such notable playwrights as Oscar Wilde or Henrik Ibsen she instituted her own ideas for filmmaking. Jerome returned to France with Betsy but she was denied landing in continental Europe. In 1918, at age 39, Nazimova felt confident enough in her abilities that she began producing and writing films in which she also starred. Jerome's brother Napoleon ordered his brother back to France and had the marriage annulled. Loyal Davis, Nazimova was made godmother to their daughter, former first lady Nancy Davis-Reagan. They were married on December 24, 1803, at a ceremony presided over by the Archbishop of Baltimore.

A friend of Edith Luckett and her husband, Dr. He was a Catholic, and the wealthiest man in Maryland after Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Her studio squelched the stories surfacing about her bisexual lifestyle and to cover it up, for more than a dozen years she lived in a partnership of mutual convenience with the homosexual actor Charles Bryant. Elizabeth's father, William, had been born in Ireland and came to North America prior to the American Revolutionary War. She became widely gossiped about for the outlandish and allegedly debauched parties in her large mansion on Sunset Boulevard known as the Garden of Allah. Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte (1785-1879), known as "Betsy", was the daughter of a Baltimore, Maryland merchant, and was the first wife of Jerome Bonaparte, and sister-in-law of Emperor Napoleon I of France. Over the next few years she made a number of highly successful films that earned her a considerable amount of money.

She toured Europe as well the United States where her first Broadway performances in 1906 drew critical acclaim. Deciding to make the USA her home, she worked on stage until she made her silent film debut in 1916. Under the stage name, Alla Nazimova, her career blossomed and she married a fellow actor but it did not last long. As a teenager she began to pursue an interest in the theatre and took acting lessons before joining a theater company in Moscow. Her emotional distress caused her to rebel against authority as a way to gain attention but nonetheless, she was a talented child who was playing the violin by age seven.

She grew up in a very dysfunctional family and was shuffled between foster homes and relatives. Born Mariam Edez Adelaida Leventon, into a Jewish family in Yalta in the Crimea which at the time was a part of Russia but today is an autonomous region of Ukraine. Alla Nazimova, born May 22, 1879 - died July 13, 1945, was a Ukrainian born stage and film actress, scriptwriter, and producer.