Pola Negri was born in Poland and moved to Warsaw as a young child. Living in poverty with her mother, a teenage Pola auditioned and was accepted to the Imperial Ballet. Due to an illness which ended her dancing career, she soon switched to the Warsaw Imperial Academy of Dramatic Arts and became an actress. By 17, she was a star on the stage in Warsaw, but World War I would soon change the theater scene. Without the theater, Pola turned to films. With her new career in pictures and her stage success in 'Sumurun', she went to Berlin and was teamed with German Director Ernst Lubitsch. The Lubitsch-Negri combination was very successful and the roles that Pola played were earthy, exotic, strong women. One of her films, 'Madame DuBarry (1919)' was optioned and retitled as 'Passion (1919)' for exhibition in America. The film was such a success that by 1922, Pola and Lubitsch were both given contracts to work in Hollywood. While her first few films showed some success, they were overshadowed by her reported romances with such stars as Chaplin and Valentino. 'Forbidden Paradise (1924)', made with Director Lubitsch, and 'Hotel Imperial (1927)' were two of her more successful films. But three things conspired to end her career in Hollywood. The display that she put on at the funeral of Valentino in 1926, changed the public mood towards her. The Hays Office codes which would not allow filming the very traits that made her a sex-siren European star. And finally, her thick accent would not play in the sound pictures that were coming into vogue. Pola Negri returned to Europe and eventually made films for UFA, which was under Nazi management. In 1941, Pola returned to American penniless. She made the movie 'Hi Diddle Diddle' in 1943 and became an American citizen in 1951. Her next and last movie was 'The Moon-Spinners (1964)'.
She was engaged to Charles Chaplin before she met and seduced Rudolph Valentino , and well before Chaplin met and married Paulette Goddard . Negri was Adolf Hitler 's favorite actress. This gave birth to rumors of an affair with Hitler. She left Germany in 1938 after Nazi officials had labeled her as having part Jewish ancestry. Among Valentino's last words were, "Pola - if she does not come in time, tell her I think of her." She cried and passed out at his funeral.Around the time of her death, she was suffering from a brain tumor (unclear if malignant or otherwise) for which she refused treatment.Sister-in-law of actress Mae Murray and socialite Barbara Hutton .On her deathbed in 1987, the 90-year-old Negri was being attended by a handsome young doctor who looked at her chart, and failed to respond immediately to seeing her name. In her best Norma Desmond mode, she reportedly pulled herself up into a "movie star" pose and asked, "You don't know who I am?!?!?".After Rudolph Valentino 's death, she claimed to have been engaged to him, although many of his friends insisted they had never even met. Undaunted by disbelievers, she ordered a blanket of flowers to be placed across Rudy's coffin, reading "P-O-L-A" in letters large enough to be read in news photos of his bier, printed in newspapers from coast to coast. No novice when it came to publicity, she then set out to prove her love for Valentino by taking a cross-country train trip to attend his funeral. At each major city, she obligingly came out to the train's rear platform and dramatically "fainted with grief." If any photographers complained that they had missed the moment, she would become so overcome with grief that she conveniently fainted a second time . . .Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume Two, 1986- 1990, pages 652-654. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999.