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FROM THE ARCHIVES
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Maleva the Gypsy (Maria Ouspenskaya), tends to the wounded Wolfman (Lon Chaney Jr.). From Universal Pictures' film The Wolfman, 1941. |
MADAME MARIA OUSPENSKAYA THE WOMAN WHO WALKED WITH WEREWOLVES.....WAS QUEEN OF THE AMAZONS.....AND WAS A FRIEND OF TARZAN. |
In the 1943 film Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman, an old gypsy woman is riding in a horse-drawn cart driven by a morose, desperate man. Suddenly the full moon appears. The man is transfixed and horror stricken at the same time. A strange transformation comes over him as he leaps from the cart and rushes over to a tree, where he leans against it for support. The old gypsy woman watches, her eyes registering no fear as the man transforms into a snarling werewolf. Anyone else would be running in fright, but the old woman pleads with the creature to stay by her side as he smells the air and gets his bearings. "Come back, come back," she yells, but the monster rushes off into the night.
Born in Tula, Russia in 1876, Maria Ouspenskaya studied singing in Warsaw and acting in Moscow. A member of the Moscow Art Theatre, she was directed by Constantin Stanislavski (of 'method acting' fame), and traveled through Europe with the Moscow Art Theatre, arriving in New York in 1922. Here, Madame Ouspenskaya performed on Broadway, and in 1929 founded the School of Dramatic Art in New York. Her performance in the 1936 Hollywood film Dodsworth earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. A second Oscar nomination was awarded her in 1939 for her role in Love Affair.
Her other Hollywood credits include, the wise wife of the Maharaja in 1939's The Rains Came; tyrannical ballet instructor Madame Olga Kirowa in Waterloo Bridge (1940); Hilda Breitner in the anti-Nazi film The Mortal Storm (1940), which prompted Adolph Hitler to ban MGM films from occupied Europe; and Madame Marie von Eln in the 1942 production of Kings Row. Madame Ouspenskaya continued working in theater productions, and in 1944 the 68 year old actress completed the Broadway run of Outrageous Fortune despite pneumonia and a high fever.
Left: Madame Ouspenskaya. Right: As Madame Kirowa in Waterloo Bridge, MGM, 1940.
"Whoever is bitten by a werewolf and lives becomes a werewolf himself." These prophetic words spoken by an old gypsy woman haunt Larry Talbot as he comes to realize that he is cursed. Universal Pictures' 1941 production of The Wolfman introduced Lon Chaney Jr. as the doomed Lawrence Talbot. Maria Ouspenskaya was brilliantly cast as Maleva, the old gypsy mother of the werewolf Bela (Bela Lugosi). Bela is a fortune teller, but Maleva's sorcery transcends power as we know it on the physical plane; hence, her ability to tend to, and not be harmed by, lycanthropes. When Bela, in the form of a wolf, attacks a young woman one night, Larry battles the creature and is bitten before killing it. Larry is aghast, later, to learn that it was the dead body of Bela the gypsy, and not a wolf, found next to the murdered Jenny. Maleva breaks the bad news to Larry: the beast he fought was her son Bela in a wolf's form. Larry was bitten in the fight. Larry is now a werewolf.
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