User:Cschuler62/sandbox

Mariia Gavrilovna Savina

Russian actress (b.1854-d.1915)

The daughter of provincial actors, she was born in Kamenets-Podpolska, studied in the Odessa gymnasia, and began performing on stage at the age of 8. In 1869, she debuted in Minsk in the play Bedovaia babushka. For her first benefit, she played Polina in Ostrovsky's Dokhodnoe mesto. From 1870, she worked in M.B. Lentovskii's Kharkov company and married the actor N.N. Savin (real name, Slavich). Aleksandra Shubert, Mikhail Shchepkin's student, taught Savina the actor's craft. P.M. Medvedev, an actor-entrepreneur, with whom Savina worked in Kazan, Saratov, and Orel (until 1872), also influenced her. She performed in vaudevilles, operettas, and comedies. From 1873, Savina was the leading actress of the Saratov theatre.

She arrived in St. Petersburg in 1874 and after a brilliant debut on the stage of the Gathering of the Nobility, she was invited to join the Aleksandrinskii theatre, where she played the role of Katia in Po dukhovnoe zaveshchanie and soon became the theatre's leading actress.

Beginning with the comedy Truth is good, but happiness is better (1876), Ostrovskii entrusted the leading roles in almost all of his new plays to her.

In 1899, she received the title "meritorious artist"; in the same year, she gave several successful performances in Berlin and Prague.

Savina's repertoire was rich and eclectic: she played roles from naive, mischievous girls in contemporary light drama to leading comic or genuinely dramatic types in works by Gogol, Ostrovsky, Turgenev, Lope de Vega, and Shakespeare. She was also an excellent interpreter of plays by foreign dramatists, including Ibsen and Zuderman; many contemporaneous Russian writers were obliged to her for the success of their works. Poetic femininity, sincere gaiety accompanied by deeply touching dramatic qualities, developed to the highest degree of mimetic perfection, were her most outstanding features.

In 1897, at Savina's initiative, the first All-Russian congress of stage artists, took place, and the Home for elderly actors was organized (1896; today, home of the Russian theatre society for stage veterans).