Ivan Mozzhukhin

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Ivan Mozzhukhin bigraphy, stories - Film

Ivan Mozzhukhin : biography

1889 – 1939

Ivan Ilyich Mozzhukhin ( 8 October (26 September) 1889—18 January 1939) was a Russian silent film actor.

Selected filmography

  • Defence of Sevastopol (1911)
  • The Night Before Christmas (1913)
  • Domik v Kolomne (The Little House in Kolomna) (1913)
  • The Queen of Spades (1916)
  • Satan Triumphant (1917)
  • Father Sergius (1917)
  • Le Brasier ardent (The Blazing Inferno) (1923)
  • La Maison du mystère (The House of Mystery) (1923)
  • Kean (1924)
  • Le Lion des Mogols (The Lion of the Mongols) (1924)
  • Feu Mathias Pascal (The Late Mathias Pascal) (1926)
  • Michel Strogoff (1926)
  • Casanova (1927)
  • Surrender (1927)
  • The White Devil (1930)
  • Casanova (1934)
  • Nitchevo (1936)

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.

Surrender in Hollywood

When Rudolph Valentino died in August 1926, Hollywood producers began searching for another face or image that might capture some iota of that unique screen presence radiated by "The Great Lover". A few of the French productions which starred Mozzhukhin were seen in large U.S. cities, where multitudes of cinemas regularly presented European films, but he was a generally unfamiliar persona to the large majority of American audiences. Universal’s Carl Laemmle, who had employed Valentino as a supporting actor in two 1919-1920 films, found out that Mozzhukhin was frequently described by the European press as the Russian Valentino. In February 1927, Mozzhukhin received a generous offer from Laemmle to come to Hollywood as the star of his own vehicle.

As it turned out, however, Surrender, lensed in the Summer of 1927, did not trust Mosjukine (as he was billed) to carry the storyline. He was only the film’s co-star, with the top billing and the central role going to Mary Philbin, a popular leading lady of the period who, eighteen months earlier, had the showy role of the girl who unmasks Lon Chaney as The Phantom of the Opera. The recent Russian Revolution was a popular film subject of the time, with the 1926 John Barrymore-Camilla Horn teaming in The Tempest and the Emil Jannings vehicle The Last Command, released three months after Surrender, being two examples of the genre. Since Laemmle’s new star was a genuine survivor of the Revolution, it seemed only natural that the story would be set in that milieu.