Michael Chekhov — The Man of 1,000 Personalities (1946) 🇺🇸
More than one distinguished character actor, by the grace of expert publicity, has become known as '"The man of a thousand faces." But Michael Chekhov, Russia's gift to Hollywood, has achieved this moniker on his own.
by Barry Farrar
In truth, Chekhov can go his illustrious predecessors in Hollywood one better. He may be described more accurately as the man with a thousand personalities. When this slight, professorial-looking man steps into the guise of a new character he undergoes a complete metamorphosis. He becomes the living, breathing reality of the being called for in the script, and then some. The "then some” is that added fillip supplied by Chekhov's creative genius.
As an example of the man's consummate skill you have only to recall his work as the psychiatrist in Spellbound. That picture was loaded with good performers, not the least being Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck; but when critics left the theater after the Hollywood premiere of Spellbound the only thing they could talk about was the performance of that then little-known actor Michael Chekhov. Nor have they ceased to talk. The characters he creates stay with you. They are alive.
Producers were as impressed as the critics. Figuratively they have been beating a path to his door ever since. But Chekhov is not amenable to doing just a "part." Any rôle he essays must be one of sufficient importance and value to call forth the best in him. Only in this way does he feel that a maximum of results can be achieved. This is the main reason he will not accept a long-term contract which would require him to take whatever the producers might ask him to do. Ben Hecht, who signed him for "Spectre of the Rose" at Republic, for example, was so impressed by his work that he wanted to contract him to make at least one picture a year under the Hecht banner. But Chekhov has an antipathy towards tying himself up with future commitments. He wants to take life in stride and will work on only a rôle-to-rôle basis.
On another recent assignment, "Cross My Heart," at Paramount, Chekhov walked into a situation just opposite to the one he had experienced with Hecht. While Hecht had known him only by reputation, John Berry, the director on "Cross My Heart," had long stood in awe of the Chekhov talent from a matter of personal knowledge. While Chekhov was conducting a season of his own personal theater in New York in 1942, Berry had come to him and obtained permission to attend his lectures. The director was a bit disconcerted, to say the least, when he was confronted by the master on a Hollywood sound stage and in the position of having to tell him what to do before a camera. In this film, incidentally, the pendulum swings to the opposite extreme from the rôle Chekhov did in Spellbound. In "Cross My Heart" he portrays an insane man who always wants to play Hamlet, while in Spellbound it was his chore to treat mental derangements.
The Chekhov talent, although it is unquestionably natural to the man, was by no means developed over-night. In other words, it's a long story; but as stories about vital human beings go, not without plenty of interesting highlights. Michael Chekhov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1891, the son of Alexander Chekhov, who by profession was a newspaperman and writer of historical novels. And although the world recognizes the actor's most famous kinsman as his uncle, Anton Chekhov, the actor was more impressed with his father.
"My father could do anything and do it well," he told me. "He had the most magnetic personality I've ever known. Actually he was hypnotic. He could look at another person and make him fall asleep. Besides his newspaper work and his writing he was also a great linguist and philosopher. And he was always augmenting his knowledge with some new interest. He was a prodigious reader in philosophy, but was equally as keen about science. He started teaching me these two branches of learning when I was a very small boy, and as a result I selected the one I liked best and decided I wanted to be a doctor. To this day, in fact, I still want to be a doctor, but I would prefer to become a chiropractor. If I ever get enough leisure time I'm going to enroll in a chiropractic college and get a degree."
But the boy, Michael, also gave evidence at a very early age of possessing a natural bent for acting. His gift for mimicking his father's friends so impressed the elder Chekhov and his wife that they decided his future was in the theater. "Fortunately or unfortunately," sighed the actor, "I prospered in my early acting career and so you see me today."
At seventeen Michael was already familiar with the boards. He ran the gamut of rôles in the state subsidized theater in St. Petersburg — now Leningrad— until he was twenty-one, and then his parents and teachers decided he would be ready for bigger things after he had served his required three years of military training. It was for the latter that he went to Moscow when he reached his majority; but luckily for the theater the young man was rejected for being underweight.
"Shortly before I was to leave Moscow," he told me, "I met my actress aunt, Olga-Knipper, wife of my uncle Anton, the playwright. She was a famous actress at the Moscow Art Theater, and in view of my previous acting experience she invited me to join the group. Naturally I did this, and I remained in Moscow until 1928. My aunt, by the way, is still one of the finest actresses in Russia although she is now 80. People still rave about her spirit and charm. To me she was a great friend as well as a great actress, and together we appeared in most of her husband's plays."
Michael remained in the Moscow Art Theater studying under Nemirovich Danchenko and Stanislavsky until 1923, when he became the director of the Second Moscow Art Theater. Developing and exploring his individual approach to the problems of the theater, he trained and directed his new company to his own methods. Simultaneously he continued his career as an actor both in the Moscow Art Theater — where he played among other rôles Khlestakov in The Inspector General — and in the Second Moscow Art Theater where he portrayed the rôles of Hamlet, Eric the XIV, Malvolio in Twelfth Night, and Caleb in The Cricket on the Hearth. During this period he also lectured and taught at workers' clubs. Of all the rôles he created in Russia the one of Hamlet was the most important to him personally, because it brought love into Michael's young life in the form of Xenia Julia Siller, daughter of a prominent Moscow industrialist. Years later — they have been married since 1919 — Mrs. Chekhov confessed that after she saw Michael's Hamlet she was so overcome that she left the party of friends she had brought to the theater and rushed out into the street, running for blocks before she knew what she had done.
Judging from this we may assume that Michael was quite the matinee idol, but he modestly passed on to another subject when I tried to enlarge this thought. But as for his wife, he is tireless in proclaiming her virtues. Miss Betty Raskin, who has come to know her very well since she started handling the actor's career, has nicknamed her Juliette. She says that only Shakespeare's famous lovers could have been closer than her client and his wife.
"There was one amusing thing about our courtship that might give your readers a laugh," Chekhov told me. "Her family felt that an actor was a little beneath Julia on the social scale and tried to discourage her from seeing me. Everything else failing, they bought her a beautiful Spitz dog to distract her attention from me, but I overcame that competition and was finally received into the family. From then on I have been on the friendliest possible terms with my in-laws." The happiness of his marriage has been a great help to the actor's career by his own admission, and without his wife he doubtless would be a lonely man. Today he doesn't have a single living blood relative left.
Taking a wife was not the only single important event during his lifetime in Russia, however, for during his early years his country underwent two great social revolutions in 1905 and 1917.
Never inclined toward politics, though, Chekhov was almost entirely oblivious to these events because of his absorption in the theater. The theater in Russia has always been subsidized by the state and a changing regime didn't make much difference in the quality of work.
By 1928 Chekhov decided he had gone as far as he could in his native land, and he decided to fulfill an old desire to go to other countries and study their theaters and acting methods. His first stops were Berlin and Vienna, where he acted in Max Reinhardt's productions, and then he went on to Paris, Prague, Kaunas and Riga, where he arranged a school for the Latvian Actors' Union.
An American tour in 1935 brought high praise from the critics, who acclaimed him as a brilliant and highly gifted actor. This tour resulted in an invitation to establish the Chekhov Theater Studio at Dartington Hall, England. In 1939 the theater moved to Ridgefield, Conn., where a series of productions were prepared for a road tour in 1940. Among some of the plays that were done in the Chekhov Theater were King Lear and Twelfth Night. Mr. Chekhov not only directed these plays but designed the sets and costumes. This tour, from Maine to Texas, evoked warm, critical praise resulting in a Broadway engagement in December 1941.
Chekhov's introduction to Hollywood came when Gregory Ratoff, at the suggestion of Sergei Rachmaninoff, persuaded him to come to MGM studios to play the rôle of Susan Peter's father in "Song of Russia."
As far as the actor and his wife are concerned they have found the place where they want to live from now on. Chekhov sees no reason why he can't direct and lecture as well as act in Hollywood, and, in fact, there already have been invitations for him to establish a school in the film colony. He is now directing a play for the Actors' Laboratory, one of the most important theater groups in Hollywood. He piloted one of his old favorites for them — Gogol's Inspector General, in which he himself has enacted Khlestakov dozens of times.
Seeing the Chekhovs at home it is understandable why they are content with their present lot. They live in a simple, six-room farmhouse on an acre of land in the San Fernando Valley. They have a large garden where they grow their own vegetables and enough room for the actor to cultivate roses. "You might say," laughed Chekhov, "that our home is practically run by our four wire-haired terriers."
Chekhov is a firm believer in the simple life and is a very religious man. He has been a member of an Anthroposophical Society since 1922, by which his spiritual beliefs are guided. To give you an idea, of his friendliness, when he did Spellbound on the air with Ingrid Bergman last year, he showed up at the studio with a gift surprise for her — a basket of grapes he and his wife had picked from their own arbor.
The Chekhov table is always graced by simple fare, including vegetables from their garden, and always an abundant supply of goat's milk. They have one goat and Mrs. Chekhov does the milking.
The actor and his wife entertain very little in their small circle of friends, and Hollywood night life just doesn't exist for them. Chekhov himself has one absorbing hobby outside of his various interests in the theater, namely chess. He invites all experts, and master players around Hollywood have a healthy respect for his skill. He also paints, and before he does a rôle he sketches the character he is going to portray from every angle so that he may view it objectively. This is part of the thoroughness of his early training in Russia. In this connection, it is fascinating to watch him direct. He has an exact concept of how every rôle should be played and acts out each character from bits to the lead to show the cast how he feels it should be done. He is a master of everything from the broadest comedy to the bleakest tragedy.
In all his long fidelity to art Chekhov has taken on a minimum of the eccentricities that usually mark a fellow of his acknowledged ability. He has, in fact, just one pronounced phobia. He detests parking an automobile and would as soon not start out on a trip in his car unless he knows there will be ample room to park the machine when he reaches his destination.
Miss Raskin always knows what she will hear when she calls to tell him he has been set for a rôle at one of the studios. As she begins to enlighten him as to the major details of the deal he invariably stops her. "Before we go into that," he will say, "tell me — how are the parking arrangements at that lot?"
Lucille Bremer and Van Johnson, featured in the I Won't Dance number of MGM's "Till the Clouds Roll By," bring out the coffee pot for that between-scenes lag.
Collection: Screenland Magazine, October 1946