Melvyn Douglas — actor with roots in the Russian Empire
Melvyn Douglas was born Melvyn Edouard Hesselberg in Macon, Georgia, on 5 April 1901. His mother, Lena Priscilla Shackelford, was a Protestant from Tennessee. His father, Edouard Gregory Hesselberg, a concert pianist and composer, was a Jewish emigrant from the Russian Empire.
Edouard Hesselberg was born in Riga, then in the Russian Empire and now the capital of Latvia, on 3 May 1870, the son of Hessel (Heinrich) Hesselberg, a Riga merchant, and Sarah Davidova, from Windau, now Ventspils. He trained as a musician and went on to an international career as a pianist, and in 1898 married Lena Shackelford in the United States. He supported the family by teaching at a succession of colleges and conservatories in the United States and Canada, including the Toronto Conservatory of Music, and died in 1935. His sisters also made careers in America, Cora as a pathologist and Rhetia as a violinist and music teacher.
Melvyn grew up moving with his father's teaching posts and never finished high school. In his autobiography he wrote that his parents kept the Jewish side of the family from him, and that he learned of it only at fourteen, from his father's sisters. For the stage he took his maternal grandmother's surname and became Melvyn Douglas.
After an early career in the theatre he became, in the 1930s, a Hollywood leading man of romantic comedy, above all as the man who makes Greta Garbo laugh in Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939); he also played opposite Irene Dunne in Theodora Goes Wild. In later life he moved into character parts. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as Paul Newman's father in Hud (1963), was nominated as Best Actor for I Never Sang for My Father (1970), and won a second supporting Oscar for Being There (1979). On Broadway he won the Tony Award for The Best Man (1960), and on television an Emmy for Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night (1967). Ninotchka, Hud and Being There are all in the National Film Registry.
His last film, Ghost Story, was released after his death. He died in New York on 4 August 1981, aged eighty. His son Gregory Hesselberg, a painter, is the father of the actress Illeana Douglas.
Tracing the roots — Riga, Livonia Governorate (now Latvia) (father)
Douglas was born in Macon, Georgia, on 5 April 1901. His father, Edouard Gregory Hesselberg, a concert pianist and composer, was a Jewish emigrant from Riga, then part of the Russian Empire. His mother, Lena Priscilla Shackelford, was a Protestant from Tennessee.
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Riga, Livonia Governorate (now Latvia) (father). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.