Death and Later Appearance in Romain Gary's Novelized Autobiography
Ivan Mozzhukhin died of tuberculosis in a Neuilly-sur-Seine clinic. All available sources give his age as 49 and year of birth as 1889. However, his gravestone at the Russian cemetery in the Parisian suburb of Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois is inscribed with the year 1887.
While Mozzhukhin left no official progeny, French novelist Romain Gary (original name Roman Kacew) had maintained that his birth in Vilnius on 8 May 1914 was the result of an affair between his mother Nina Owczyńska and the 24-year-old Ivan Mozzhukhin who was on the verge of becoming the most popular leading man of Czarist cinema. At the time, Nina was a young, minor Polish-Jewish provincial actress, recently married to one Arieh Kacew. In 1960, Gary wrote a novelized autobiographical account of his mother's struggles and triumphs, La promesse de l'aube (Promise at Dawn), which became the basis for an English-language play and a French-American film. The play, Samuel A. Taylor's First Love, opened on Broadway at the Morosco Theatre on Christmas Day 1961 and closed on 13 January 1962, after 24 performances. In 1970, returning to its original title, it was adapted for the screen and directed by Jules Dassin as a vehicle for his wife Melina Mercouri (then aged 49), who played Nina. Dassin, who was 59 years old at the time, chose to play Mozzhukhin himself in the single scene that the character appears in the film.
Read more about this topic: Ivan Mozzhukhin
Famous quotes containing the words death and, death, appearance and/or romain:
“Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“For in the word death
There is nothing to grasp; nothing to catch or claim;
Nothing to adapt the skill of the heart to, skill
In surviving, for death it cannot survive,
Only resign the irrecoverable keys.
The wave falters and drowns. The coulter of joy
Breaks. The harrow of death
Depends. And there are thrown up waves.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“I think I am one of those who can manage not to take on a completely different appearance under their own glance.”
—Jean Rostand (1894–1977)
“Ce corps qui s’appelait et qui s’appelle encore le saint empire romain n’était en aucune manière ni saint, ni romain, ni empire. This agglomeration which called itself and still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)