The mural adorns the façade of a house adjacent to the building in which she lived in 1919 and 1920.
Dagmara Giej-Rusnak, a member of the residential community that commissioned the mural, has said that the idea of the project is “to preserve the memory of Pola Negri and stimulate interest in this fascinating actress.”
Negri’s stay in Sosnowiec was the outcome of her marriage to Count Eugeniusz Dąmbski, who served as the commander of local police and the Border Guard service.
While travelling from Warsaw to Berlin with a copy of her film Slave of Sin in her luggage, she had the film reel confiscated by a customs official at the Sosnowiec border station. She was taken to Dąmbski’s office and that was how they met.
After getting married, the couple lived at 4 Kołłątaja Street in the town. Their marriage, however, lasted only about a year. Several years later, Negri left for Hollywood.
Negri was born Apolonia Chałupiec in 1894 in Lipno, central Poland, into a poor family. In her teens, she auditioned and was accepted to the Imperial Ballet in Warsaw, but her dancing career was soon interrupted by an illness and she enrolled at the Academy of Dramatic Arts to become an actress.
In 1913, she made her stage debut and a year later appeared in her first film. Soon she was a top star in Poland, prompting German director Max Reinhardt to invite her to act in Berlin theatres as well as in films.
In Hollywood, her exotic, mysterious qualities caught on with American audiences. She also attracted a great deal of publicity for her off-screen romances.
She made headlines with an engagement to Charlie Chaplin; broke with Chaplin and took up with Rudolph Valentino. Valentino's death in 1926 marked the beginning of her slip in popularity with the American public.
With the advent of the sound era, Negri returned to Europe. From 1927 to 1931, she was married to a Russian prince; she divorced him because he mismanaged her investments during the stock market crash.
She became popular again in Germany after starring in several films there. She settled on the French Riviera, then returned to the United States in 1941, ten years later becoming a US citizen.
She died in San Antonio, Texas in 1987, at the age of 93. She appeared in 63 films from 1914 to 1964.
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