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Helena Modjeska

Krakow, Poland, 1840 - 1909, Newport, California

BiographyModjeska, Helena (12 Oct. 1840-8 Apr. 1909), actress, was born in Cracow, Poland, the daughter of Jozefa Misel, whose husband, Szymon Benda, a businessman, died ten years before Modjeska was born. Although Modjeska's paternity is not certain, she was called Helena (originally Jadwiga) Opid, after the music teacher Michael Opid, who lived in the Benda home until his death (c. 1847). She was given private lessons in music from the age of four and attended a local convent school until she was fourteen. The Cracow fire of 1850 left the family destitute until they were befriended by Gustav Sinnmayer, a wealthy Austrian who came to live with them. Under his guidance, Helena spent her evenings avidly studying German and dramatic literature. In theatrical circles Sinnmayer used the name Modrzejewski; thus it was as Helena Modrzejewska that she made her theatrical debut in July 1861 at a charity event in the salt-mining town of Bochnia, where Sinnmayer and she had gone to live when it was learned that she was pregnant. They had a son, Rudolph, on 27 January 1861; it is not known whether they ever married. A daughter, Marylka, was born the following year but died at the age of three.

Capitalizing on Modjeska's evident talent, Sinnmayer formed a theater company to tour the provinces under the management of Konstanty Lobojko. Acclaimed for the charm and passion of her acting as well as for a repertoire that reflected Polish nationalist sentiment, Modjeska enjoyed four years on the road in Poland. In 1865 her half brother Felix Benda, a popular actor in Cracow, obtained a place for her with the Cracow theater company, for which--under difficult circumstances--she left Sinnmayer; he died a year or two later.

At the Cracow theater Modjeska was able to extend her dramatic range, taking special pleasure in the chance to perform some Shakespearean roles: Portia, Ophelia, and Hero. In 1866 on a company tour to Poznán, she met Karol Chlapowski, a member of the wealthy Polish aristocracy who had been recently released after twenty-one months in prison for anti-Prussian revolutionary activities. They married on 12 September 1868 despite objections from members of his family, and they defied convention by her continuation of her stage career. On 4 October 1868 she made her Warsaw debut in the difficult role of Adrienne Lecouvreur, the title role in the historical drama by Eugène Scribe; it brought her overnight stardom and the offer of a lifetime contract at the Warsaw Imperial Theatre. She accepted with the proviso that she be allowed to choose six new plays each season to be added to the repertoire.

For eight years Modjeska remained as a leading actress with the Warsaw company and performed 284 different roles, but eventually she longed for greater challenges. When the American actor Maurice Neville visited Warsaw in 1874, he performed Hamlet and Othello in English to her Polish-language Ophelia and Desdemona. So impressed was he by the quality of her acting that he encouraged her to learn English to facilitate touring abroad. The death of her brother Felix in 1875 and her husband's increasing frustrations over political conditions in Poland led to their decision to emigrate. Along with the author Henryk Sienkiewicz and a few other friends, they planned a utopian Polish colony in California. After spending a month in San Francisco, where Modjeska saw performances by Edwin Booth, the group settled on a farm near Anaheim in November 1876.

Modjeska began an intensive study of her great roles in English. By January 1877 she was ready to audition at the California Theatre in San Francisco, where she was granted a one-week engagement, opening with Adrienne Lecouvreur on 20 August 1877. Eyewitness accounts testify that she "gripped" audiences "by the heartstrings" (Fair Rosalind, p. 94), thus winning an extended run. There she also played Ophelia to the Hamlet of John McCullough, endearing herself to San Francisco's large Polish community by switching into Polish for Ophelia's mad scene. It was McCullough, then managing the California Theatre, who shortened her stage name from Modrzejewska to Modjeska. The American press further dubbed her "Countess," borrowing for her husband the title "Count Bozenta" from another branch of his family.

Modjeska's first American tour began in Virginia City, Nevada, on 23 October 1877. Her repertoire consisted of Adrienne Lecouvreur, Romeo and Juliet, and Camille (The Lady of the Camellias). She played Carson City, Reno, Sacramento, San Jose, and various small towns before returning to the California Theatre. Reviews typically praised "her grace of movement, her striking physical expressions of the passions and emotions, and her womanly sensibility" (San Francisco Call, 2 Dec. 1877) but expressed reservations about "the mincing of a foreign accent" (San Francisco Bulletin, 28 Nov. 1877).

For her New York debut at the Fifth Avenue Theatre on 22 December 1877, Modjeska was rehearsed by Dion Boucicault. On a budget so tight that her husband could not afford to accompany her from the West Coast, she was responsible for providing her own costumes. She opened her run with Adrienne Lecouvreur, garnering extravagant praise from the leading critic William Winter, who wrote "that her intonation, gesture, movement and play of countenance were all spontaneous, that even her garments, devised and fashioned in a sumptuous and delicate taste not precedented on a stage in this country, seemed a part of the outgrowth and fragrance of the character, and that all her looks and actions sprung from and crystallized around her condition. The spectator could not know that she was acting; and art, of course, can do no more than to perfect and sustain the illusion which genius creates" (New York Tribune, 24 Dec. 1877).

The rapturous critical response to Modjeska's refined and sensitive interpretation of the fallen woman in Camille signaled what was to be regarded as one of her greatest roles. Reviewers cited her "subtlety" and "powerful . . . intensity" (New York Herald, 15 Jan. 1878). Even the prompter was said to have been so overcome with emotion during her scene with Armand's father in act 3 that he threw down the promptscript, reduced to sobs (Modjeska, Memories and Impressions, p. 356). She repeated her triumphs in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Boston, and elsewhere, all the while studying hard to improve her English. Following her third successful American season she paid a return visit to Poland, and by giving performances at the Warsaw Theatre from December 1879 to February 1880 she was able to pay the 5000-ruble penalty she had incurred when she broke her contract to leave Poland. Modjeska made her London debut at the Court Theatre on 1 May 1880, triumphing once again. She played two seasons there, then returned to Poland to produce Ibsen's A Doll's House, the first of his plays seen in Poland. She also gave the play its first professional American production--retitled Thora--at McCauley's Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky, on 7 December 1883; Maurice Barrymore played Torwald. Over the years, Modjeska won her greatest renown as an actress in her favorite roles, the women of Shakespeare: Rosalind, Ophelia, Juliet, Beatrice, Viola, Portia, Queen Katharine. Indeed, when she bought a ranch in El Toro, California, she named it Arden. In the 1889-1890 season she toured with Edwin Booth. When they played in Cincinnati and Booth was asked about Modjeska, he replied: "She is a genius. I learn something from her every day" (Fair Rosalind, p. 538).

Modjeska's career was frequently interrupted by ill health, which was exacerbated by the strain of touring, a necessity for a career on the American stage at the time. She longed to return to acting with a resident company in Poland, but the financial burden of supporting her husband and son as well as dependent family members in Poland kept her in the American theater for most of her career. Her husband and son became American citizens on 4 July 1883. His name altered to Ralph Modjeski, her son Rudolph became a civil engineer. Modjeska's nearly three decades on the American stage culminated in a benefit performance arranged for her by the pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski at New York's Metropolitan Opera House on 2 May 1905. She performed several selections, including scenes as Lady Macbeth opposite James O'Neill. After a final season of touring in 1906-1907, she and her husband moved to a small house on Bay Island in Balboa Bay, East Newport, California, where she died of Bright's disease. Funeral services were held in Los Angeles on 17 July 1909. Her husband later returned her remains to Poland to be buried in Rakowicki Cemetery in Cracow, among her ancestors.

Modjeska had strong facial features, but her stage presence was often described as refined and dainty. According to Charles E. L. Wingate, she gave all her roles "a womanly earnestness, an artistic sincerity, and an aesthetic beauty, that have made them warm, breathing characters of genuine interest and ennobling effect" (Famous American Actors of To-Day, ed. Frederic Edward McKay and Charles E. L. Wingate [1896], p. 80). In addition to the accomplishment of an illustrious career as a performer in a language she began to study only in her twenties, Modjeska is remembered for her gracious and womanly refinement and for her emphasis on a classic repertoire, especially Shakespeare, in an era when melodrama dominated the American stage.

Bibliography

A Modjeska clipping file is in the Billy Rose Theater Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Modjeska's autobiography is Memories and Impressions of Helena Modjeska (1910). Many nineteenth-century biographies and journal articles contain spurious details--for example, Jameson Altemus, Helena Modjeska (1883). Reliable accounts are Arthur Prudden Coleman and Marion Moore Coleman, Wanderers Twain: Modjeska and Sienkiewicz: A View from California (1964), which incorporates material supplied by Modjeska's granddaughter Marylka Modjeska Pattison, and Marion Moore Coleman, Fair Rosalind: The American Career of Helena Modjeska (1969). The latter includes a complete listing of Modjeska's known professional performances on the American stage, but omits her two London seasons as well as appearances in Poland and France. A feature article, "Modjeska," by Charles deKay, appeared in Scribner's Monthly, Mar. 1879, pp. 665-71, with a follow-up letter of correction from her husband (May 1879). Substantial entries appear in the standard sources. An obituary is in the New York Times, 9 Apr. 1909.

Felicia Hardison Londré

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Citation:
Felicia Hardison Londré. "Modjeska, Helena";
http://www.anb.org/articles/18/18-00852.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Access Date: Mon Aug 05 2013 17:05:04 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)
Copyright © 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.

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