Biography

Official Russian records state that she died of the Spanish flu during the pandemic of 1919. While that seems quite likely, there is much speculation around her death. It was claimed that she was poisoned by the French ambassador with whom she reportedly had an affair and who believed that she was a spy for the Bolsheviks.

Newsreel cameras captured Kholodnaya's open casket funeral in Odessa. This footage has been more widely seen than any of her surviving films.

As a leading pop culture symbol of Russia's late Czarist era, Kholodnaya was discredited and her films banned by the new Soviet government. When Odessa's First Christian Cemetery, where she was buried, was razed in 1931, the authorities ignored her family's pleas to move her remains to Moscow and her grave was unceremoniously destroyed. Over 70 years later a cenotaph for Kholodnaya was placed at the Second Christian Cemetery in Odessa. It is a replica of her lost original tombstone, based on old photographs.

In 1918 director Konstantin Stanislavski invited Kholodnaya to join his prestigious Moscow Art Theatre. This would've given her relative stability during the harsh Civil War years, but she remained faithful to film producer Dmitri Kharitonov and moved with his studio to Odessa, Ukraine. She died there from Spanish flu a few months later.

Her husband, Vladimir Kholdny, died 2 months after her. Her mother, Yekaterina Sleptsova, also died shortly after her.