Pola Negri - Later Career

Later Career

Negri's initial 1928 retirement turned out to be short-lived. Negri miscarried her baby, and eventually learned that her husband was gambling her fortune away on speculative business ventures, which strained their relationship. She went back into pictures when an independent production company offered her work in a British film production that was to be distributed by Gaumont-British. Initially the film was to be a filmed version of George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, and Shaw even offered to alter the play to suit the film. When the rights proved to be too expensive, the company settled on an original story and hired German Kammerspielfilm director Paul Czinner to direct. The resulting film, The Way Of Lost Souls (also known as The Woman He Scorned), was released in 1929; it would be Negri's final silent film.

Negri returned to Hollywood in 1931 to begin filming her first talking film, A Woman Commands (1932). The film itself was poorly received, but Negri's rendition of the song "Paradise", the centerpiece of the film, became a sizable hit in the sheet music format. The song went onto become a minor standard, and was covered by many other performers, including Russ Columbo and Louis Prima and Keely Smith. Negri went on a successful vaudeville tour to promote the song. She was then employed in the leading role of the touring theatre production A Trip To Pressburg, which premiered at the Shubert Theater in New York. However, she collapsed after the final curtain at the production's stop at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania due to gall bladder inflammation and was unable to complete the tour.

Negri returned to France to appear in Fanatisme (Fanaticism, 1934), an historical costume film about Napoleón III. The film was directed by the directorial team of Tony Lekain and Gaston Ravel and released by Pathé. It was her only French film.

After this, actor-director Willi Forst brought Negri to Germany appear in the film Mazurka (1935). Mazurka gained much popularity in Germany and abroad, and became one of Adolf Hitler's favorite films, a fact that, along with her admiring comments about the efficiency of the German film industry, gave birth to a rumor in 1937 about Negri having had an affair with Hitler. Negri sued Pour Vous, a French magazine that had circulated the rumor, for libel, and won the case. Mazurka was remade (almost shot-for-shot) in the U.S. as a Kay Francis picture, Confession (1937).

After the success of Mazurka, Negri's former studio, the now-Joseph Goebbels controlled UFA, signed Negri to a new contract. Negri lived in France while working for UFA, making five films with them: Moskau-Shanghai (Moscow-Shanghai, 1936), Madame Bovary (1937), Tango Notturno (1937), Die Fromme Lüge (The Secret Lie, 1938), and Die Nacht der Entscheidung (The Night of Decision, 1939).

After the Nazis took over France, Negri found the oppression of the regime too much to bear, and fled back to America. She sailed to New York from Lisbon, Portugal, and initially lived by selling off her jewelry collection. Negri was hired in a supporting role as the temperamental opera singer Genya Smetana for the 1943 comedy Hi Diddle Diddle. After the success of this film, Negri was offered numerous roles which were essentially rehashes of her role in Hi Diddle Diddle, all of which she turned down. In 1944, Negri was engaged by booking agent Miles Ingalls for a nationwide vaudeville tour. According to her autobiography, she also appeared in a Boston supper club engagement in 1945 for a repertoire centered around the song "Paradise", and soon after decided to retire from the entertainment business altogether.