Childhood
Artmane was born Alīda Artmane at the time when Latvia was a sovereign nation. Her father, Franz (Fritz) Artmann, of Baltic German ancestry, died in a tragic accident aged 19, just four months before she was born. Her Polish mother Anna Zaborowska survived as a single mother by doing seasonal agricultural jobs. As a young girl, Artmane grew up playing in the fields; she was fond of wild flowers and learned to make flower arrangements and dolls in the Latvian traditional style. While her mother worked for a landlord, her master sent young Artmane to study music and dance at a ballet class for couple of years. However, at the age of 10, young Artmane became a shepherd girl. She worked with a herd of cows for over five years, and survived until the end of the Second World War. In 1946 she graduated from secondary school and had a dream of becoming a lawyer in order to make the world a better place. At the same time she was involved in amateur acting at her school, and became interested in film and theatre, and eventually her passion for acting prevailed.
Read more about this topic: Vija Artmane
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“Modern children were considerably less innocent than parents and the larger society supposed, and postmodern children are less competent than their parents and the society as a whole would like to believe. . . . The perception of childhood competence has shifted much of the responsibility for child protection and security from parents and society to children themselves.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Adolescence is a tough time for parent and child alike. It is a time between: between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal responsibility, between life stage- managed by grown-ups and life privately held.”
—Anna Quindlen (20th century)