Vera Vsevolodovna Baranovskaya (Russian: Вера Всеволодовна Барановская; 1885 – 7 December 1935) was a Russian Empire and Soviet actress.[1] She performed in more than twenty films between 1916 and 1935.[2][3]

Vera Baranovskaya
Vera Baranovskaya
Born
Vera Vsevolodovna Baranovskaya

1885
Died7 December 1935(1935-12-07) (aged 49–50)
Paris, France
NationalityRussian
OccupationActress
Years active1916–1935

Biography

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Baranovskaya was born in 1885 Saint Petersburg. She studied acting at the Moscow Art Theatre, where her teacher was Konstantin Stanislavsky. She became member of the Moscow Art Theater troupe in 1903. In 1915 she began to perform independently in theaters of Kharkiv, Odessa, Tiflis, Kazan, and other cities.

Baranovskaia’s screen debut was in The Thief-Benefactor (1916), an Anton Chekhov adaptation.

In the year 1922 she founded the artistic-theatrical workshop ("Mastbar") in Moscow. In the 1920s she worked in Germany and Czechoslovakia.

In 1926, Vsevolod Pudovkin cast her as Nilovna, the heroine of his revolutionary tragedy Mother, an adaptation of Maksim Gorky’s 1906 novel. Baranovskaia, who was 40 at the time of shooting, portrayed a much older woman who is devoted to her son and ultimately accepts the inevitability of class struggle. Pudovkin also cast Baranovskaia as the harsh worker’s wife who undergoes a transformation in The End of St. Petersburg (1927). One of her last roles in Soviet cinema was in Abram Room’s social drama Pits (1928). In 1928 Baranovskaia left the USSR for Czechoslovakia, Germany, and later France, where she continued acting. Sometimes she played parts of proletarians, as in Mikhail Dubson’s Poison Gas (1929) and Carl Jung-hans’s Such Is Life (1929). Her last part, was of a duchess in Max Neufeld’s adaptation of a Viennese operetta, Eternal Waltz (1935).

She died in 1935 in Paris.

Selected filmography

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Film
Year Title Role Notes
1926 Mother Pelageya Nilovna Vlasova
1927 The End of St. Petersburg Bolshevik worker's wife
1929 Revolt in the Reformatory Fritz's Mother
1929 Such Is Life Washerwoman
1929 Misled Youth Witwe Kröger
1929 The Age of Seventeen
1929 Poison Gas
1930 Tonka of the Gallows
1930 St. Wenceslas
1931 Reckless Youth
1932 The Night at the Hotel
1932 Monsieur Albert La duchesse
1934 At the End of the World

References

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  1. ^ Peter Rollberg (2016). Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Cinema. US: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 81–82. ISBN 1442268425.
  2. ^ "Вера Барановская". VokrugTV.
  3. ^ "Вера Барановская". Encyclopedia of Native Cinema.
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