Alla Nazimova & Rudolph Valentino in Camille (1921)

Alla Nazimova & Rudolph Valentino in Camille (1921, dir. Ray Smallwood)

“I am writing a play about a woman dancing with her bare feet in the blood of a man she has craved for and slain.”

-Oscar Wilde (1891)

Alla Nazimova in Salome (1923, dir. Charles Bryant), the screen adaptation of Wilde’s play. Above, she performs the “Dance of the Seven Veils” to seduce King Herod into ordering the beheading of John the Baptist; below, the execution.

“I am vain, and afraid that I’ll leave nothing of myself behind when I die, nothing to be remembered by…An actress is dead when the last person to remember her dies! And that’s not enough for me!””

-Alla Nazimova (quote/photo via, 1923)

Alla Nazimova & Arthur Jasmine in Salome (1923, dir. Charles Bryant)

Production designer Natacha Rambova based much of Salome’s decor and costumes on the decadent illustrations Aubrey Beardsley produced for the first edition of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome.

The above still is a recreation of Beardsley’s The Peacock Skirt

Alla Nazimova in Camille (1921, dir. Ray Smallwood) (via) 

Photo by Arthur Rice.

Alla Nazimova & Rudolph Valentino in Camille (1921, dir. Ray Smallwood) (via) 

Photo by Arthur Rice.

Alla Nazimova & Montgomery Clift in publicity still for the Broadway production of The Mother (1939) (via)