Peter Ustinov — actor with roots in the Russian Empire
He was born Peter Alexander Freiherr von Ustinow in Swiss Cottage, London, in April 1921, two months after his parents left Russia. He liked to point out that he had been conceived in Saint Petersburg, born in London and baptised in Germany, which was an economical summary of a genuinely improbable family.
His mother was Nadezhda Leontievna Benois (1896-1975), known as Nadia, a painter and stage designer who had trained at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts and worked for the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre. She belonged to the Benois family, the most concentrated artistic dynasty of imperial Russia - by one count more than fifty artists across its generations, now gathered in a family museum in Saint Petersburg. Her grandfather Nikolai Benois built the mansion near the Mariinsky in which she grew up. Her father, Leon Benois, was a leading imperial architect and the owner of the Leonardo now known as the Benois Madonna. Her uncle Alexandre Benois, who lived next door and taught her in his own studio, designed the first great Diaghilev ballets and was among the founders of the Ballets Russes.
His father's side was stranger still. Jona von Ustinov - known lifelong as Klop, Russian for bedbug - was born in Jaffa in the Ottoman Empire, the son of Baron Plato von Ustinov, a Russian officer who had left the empire and settled in Palestine, and of Magdalena Hall, whose mother was an Ethiopian court lady and whose father was a Krakow-born Jewish convert who cast cannon for the Ethiopian emperor. Klop flew for the German air force in the First World War and travelled to Saint Petersburg in 1919 to rejoin his mother and sister. There he met Nadia Benois. They married in a Russian-German church in the city in July 1920 and left in February 1921, when she was seven months pregnant.
Klop worked as a journalist in Berlin and Amsterdam and then at the German embassy in London. In 1935 the Nuremberg laws forced him out of German service; he took British nationality, and during the war he worked as an agent for MI5.
Peter Ustinov grew up multilingual - Russian, French, German, Italian, English - and became an actor, playwright, director, novelist and broadcaster, with two Academy Awards for Spartacus and Topkapi, a long tenure as Hercule Poirot, and decades of work as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. In 1986 he made a BBC series about Russia, travelling some hundred thousand miles through more than thirty cities of the country his parents had left before he was born. He died in Switzerland in 2004.
"Parents left Saint Petersburg for London, February 1921"
Migration storyTracing the roots — St. Petersburg
Born in London two months after his parents' departure from Russia. He made a BBC documentary series on the country in 1986, travelling through more than thirty Russian cities.
Son of the painter and stage designer Nadia Benois (1896-1975) of the Benois artistic dynasty of Saint Petersburg - her father the imperial architect Leon Benois, her uncle Alexandre Benois of the Ballets Russes - and of Jona 'Klop' von Ustinov, son of the Russian-born Baron Plato von Ustinov. His parents married in Saint Petersburg in 1920 and left Russia in February 1921.
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St. Petersburg. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"'I am not a professional anything. I am simply myself, which takes up a great deal of my time.'"