Natasha Rambova
| Natacha Rambova | |
|---|---|
Rambova by Russell Ball, 1924
|
|
| Born |
Winifred Kimball Shaughnessy January 19, 1897 Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S. |
| Died | June 5, 1966 (aged 69) Pasadena, California, U.S. |
| Cause of death | Heart attack |
| Other names |
Winifred Hudnut
|
| Occupation | |
| Height | 5 ft 8 in (1.73 m) |
| Spouse(s) |
Rudolph Valentino (m. 1923; div. 1925) Álvaro de Urzáiz (m. 1934; div. 1939) |
| Relatives | Heber C. Kimball (great-grandfather) |
Natacha Rambova (born Winifred Kimball Shaughnessy; January 19, 1897 – June 5, 1966) was an American film costume and set designer, and occasional actress who was active in Hollywood in the 1920s. In her later life, she would abandon design to pursue other interests, specifically Egyptology, a subject on which she became a published scholar in the 1950s.
Born into a prominent Mormon family in Salt Lake City, Rambova was raised in San Francisco and educated in England before beginning her career as a dancer, performing under Russian ballet choreographer Theodore Kosloff in New York City. She relocated to Los Angeles at age nineteen, where she became an established costume designer for Hollywood film productions. It was there she became acquainted with actor Rudolph Valentino, with whom she had a two-year marriage from 1923 to 1925. Rambova's association with Valentino afforded her a widespread celebrity typically afforded to actors. Although they shared many interests such as art, poetry and spiritualism, his colleagues felt that she exercised too much control over his work and blamed her for several expensive career flops.
After divorcing Valentino in 1925, Rambova operated her own clothing store in Manhattan before moving to Europe and marrying the aristocrat Álvaro de Urzáiz in 1934. It was during this time that she visited Egypt, and developed a fascination with the country that would remain for the rest of her life. Rambova spent her later years studying Egyptology and earned two Mellon Grants to travel there and study Egyptian symbols and belief systems. She served as the editor of the first three volumes of Egyptian Religious Texts and Representations (1954–7) by Alexandre Piankoff, also contributing a chapter on symbology in the third volume. She died in 1966 in California of a heart attack while working on a manuscript examining patterns within the texts in the Pyramid of Unas.
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