Rouben Mamoulian — director (dr. jekyll) with roots in the Russian Empire
Rouben Zachary Mamoulian was born in Tiflis, now Tbilisi, then in the Russian Empire, on 8 October 1897 (one French reference gives 1898), into an Armenian family. His father, Zachary Mamoulian, was a bank president; his mother, Virginia, née Kalantarian, was a director of the Armenian theatre. At seven he moved with his parents to Paris, where he lived for six years, and he later studied criminal law at Moscow University. Drawn to the theatre, he trained at the Moscow Art Theatre in the studio of Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Stanislavsky's disciple, and in 1918 founded his own drama studio in Tiflis.
In 1922, staying with his married sister in London, he began directing plays and operettas, with success at the St James's Theatre. In 1923 he was invited to Rochester, New York, by George Eastman's new theatre, where he directed opera and from 1925 to 1926 headed the school of dance and drama. His Broadway breakthrough came with the Theatre Guild's production of DuBose and Dorothy Heyward's Porgy (1927), performed by an all-Black cast; in 1935 he staged its operatic version, George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.
In Hollywood he became one of the most inventive directors of early sound film. Applause (1929), shot at Paramount's studio in Queens, was noted for its mobile camera and inventive use of sound; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and the musical Love Me Tonight (1932) followed, and Becky Sharp (1935), adapted from Thackeray's Vanity Fair, was the first feature filmed in three-strip Technicolor; it was added to the National Film Registry in 2019. Among his other films were We Live Again (1934), from Tolstoy's Resurrection, the musical High, Wide and Handsome (1937) and Blood and Sand (1941), in which Alla Nazimova appeared.
Returning to Broadway, he directed the original productions of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (1943) and Carousel (1945), insisting that song and dance should carry the story, and of Kurt Weill's Lost in the Stars (1949). His film career ended when he was replaced as director of Porgy and Bess (1959) and of Cleopatra (1963). The Directors Guild of America gave him its lifetime achievement award in 1982.
He died in Woodland Hills, California, on 4 December 1987, aged ninety.
"Left for London, where he directed plays from 1922, and moved to the United States in 1923 at the invitation of George Eastman's theatre in Rochester."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia)
Born in Tiflis in 1897 into an Armenian family — his father a bank president, his mother a director of the Armenian theatre — he studied law at Moscow University, trained in Yevgeny Vakhtangov's studio of the Moscow Art Theatre and founded a drama studio in Tiflis in 1918.
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Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.