Few actresses in Hollywood’s Golden Age carried the weight of centuries in their eyes quite like Maria Ouspenskaya. With her measured voice, stern bearing, and luminous presence, she could turn a few lines into prophecy — and did, most memorably, in 1941’s The Wolf Man.

Born in Tula, Russia, on July 29, 1876, Ouspenskaya was trained in the rarefied halls of the Imperial School of Dramatic Art in Moscow, where she studied under the legendary Konstantin Stanislavski, founder of the Moscow Art Theatre. She became one of his earliest disciples, absorbing the principles of emotional truth and psychological realism that would later revolutionize Western acting.

In 1922, she emigrated to the United States, escaping post-revolutionary turmoil and joining the Moscow Art Theatre’s American tour. Settling in New York, she co-founded the School of Dramatic Art with fellow émigré Richard Boleslavsky, teaching what would become the foundation of “Method Acting.” Among her students were future stage and screen luminaries who credited her with bringing the discipline of art to the chaos of ambition.

Hollywood discovered her late. Ouspenskaya made her film debut at nearly sixty, and within a year was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in Dodsworth (1936), where her brief but unforgettable performance as a worldly European countess captivated audiences. A second nomination followed for Love Affair (1939), proof that gravitas, not glamour, could command the screen.

Yet it was as the gypsy mystic Maleva in The Wolf Man (1941) that Maria Ouspenskaya entered the realm of legend. Her voice — low, deliberate, and touched with an accent that seemed carved from old folklore — gave the film its poetry and its curse:

“Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night...”

The line, like the actress, became immortal.

Ouspenskaya continued teaching and performing through the 1940s, revered in both Hollywood and New York as a bridge between the classic Russian stage and modern American acting. But her final years were shadowed by ill health and financial strain. In 1949, after accidentally falling asleep while smoking, a fire broke out in her Los Angeles apartment. She suffered severe burns and died days later at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, aged seventy-three.

She is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale — an ocean away from Moscow, but within sight of the studios that made her eternal.

She brought to Hollywood the soul of the theatre — and to the theatre, the immortality of film.