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:
““Come; see the oxen kneel,
“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“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)
“Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime. A man at five and thirty should no more regret not having had a happier childhood than he should regret not having been born a prince of the blood.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)