Ludmilla Pitoëff — stage actress with roots in the Russian Empire
Ludmilla Pitoëff was born Ludmila Yakovlevna Smanova in Tiflis, in the Russian Empire, now Tbilisi in Georgia, on 25 December in the mid-1890s; sources give 1895, 1896 and, in one French theatre dictionary, 1889. The daughter of an official, she came to Paris at about fifteen with her mother, who had decided to settle there, and from 1912 to 1915 studied singing, dance and music.
In July 1915 she married Georges Pitoëff, a director and actor also from Tiflis, and joined the company he was forming in Geneva, making her stage debut there in a play by Alexander Blok. In Geneva and, from 1922, in Paris, she was the leading actress of the Pitoëff company, which played at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées, the Théâtre des Arts, the Vieux-Colombier and, from 1934, the Théâtre des Mathurins. Her roles included Masha in Tolstoy's The Living Corpse (1918), Ophelia (1920), Marguerite in The Lady of the Camellias, Sonya, Nina and Irina in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, The Seagull and Three Sisters, Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House (1930) and Seneca's Medea (1932).
Her pure voice and passionate, poetic acting gave her a particular affinity with the heroines of Chekhov, Ibsen, Claudel and Shaw, and the title role in Shaw's Saint Joan, which she first played in 1925 and again in 1934, made her one of the great actresses of Paris between the wars. The couple's children included the actor and director Sacha Pitoëff and Aniouta Pitoëff, who later wrote a book about her mother and whose portrait by Picasso appears in that book. Trinity College, Cambridge, holds archive material relating to the couple.
After Georges died in September 1939, she continued to stage productions in Switzerland, then went to North America, where she lived from 1941, played in Montreal, and on Broadway made her debut in 1944 as Madame Fisher in The House in Paris. After the liberation of France she returned to Paris in 1945 and, with her son Sacha, struggled in difficult financial circumstances to keep the company going. She died on 15 September 1951, aged about fifty-five, in Paris or, according to other sources, in nearby Rueil-Malmaison.
"Came to Paris at about fifteen with her mother; from 1915 in Geneva and from 1922 in Paris with her husband's company; Switzerland, the United States and Canada after 1939; Paris from 1945."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Tiflis, Tiflis Governorate (now Tbilisi, Georgia)
Born Ludmila Yakovlevna Smanova in Tiflis, in the Russian Empire, in the mid-1890s, the daughter of an official, she moved to Paris with her mother as a teenager and married a fellow native of Tiflis, the director Georges Pitoëff, in 1915.
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Tiflis, Tiflis Governorate (now Tbilisi, Georgia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.