Anna Pavlova

Anna Pavlova (1983)

Анна Павлова

The young talented girl Anya, dreaming of a ballet, enters the choreographic school. Due to poor health, learning for her becomes unbearably difficult, but dreams of a ballerina career make her stubbornly deal with adversity. Anna’s performance and determination does not go unnoticed by the celebrated choreographer Marius Petipa, who helps to stage Pavlova's examination performance. Such a gift becomes a starting point for Ani in the world of big ballet, her fast-paced career, position in high society and world fame make her forget about close friends and especially her faithful Michel Fokine, who invested a lot of energy in the formation of a ballerina.

Date of release
1983-08-01
TMDB
4.9 / 10 (9)
Runtime
2h 35m
Genres
Drama
Director
Emil Loteanu

Casting

Interesting facts

Anna Pavlova, also known as A Woman for All Time, is a 1983 biographical drama film depicting the life of the Russian ballet dancer Anna Pavlova, written and directed by Emil Loteanu and starring Galina Belyayeva, James Fox and Sergey Shakurov. It depicts Pavlova's passion for art and her collaboration with the reformers of ballet including Michel Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky and Sergei Diaghilev.

Production

Martin Scorsese, a great admirer of Michael Powell's films, originally convinced Robert De Niro to play the American impresario Sol Hurok

and Jack Nicholson to portray Pavlova's husband and manager, Victor Dandré. The casting was rejected by the Russian Ministry of Culture, as The Deer Hunter in which De Niro acted was conceived as anti-Communist, and Nicholson had made disparaging remarks about the Soviet Union in interviews. Nicholson's role was eventually played by James Fox and De Niro's by John Murray, the brother of Bill Murray.

The ensemble of the Leningrad Kirov Ballet danced the original choreography, and in original decor and most of Pavlova's repertoire is performed.

There were tensions at Mosfilm during editing due to its almost three-hour length. The contract stated that Loteanu had control over the English version, yet the film was shortened dramatically. Loteanu stated "Had I known at the outset that the contract would be broken, I would not have made the film at all."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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