found: Wikipedia, February 16, 2016(Natacha Rambova; born Winifred Kimball Shaughnessy on January 19, 1897 in Salt Lake City, Utah; died June 5, 1966 in Pasadena, California; American film costume and set designer, best known for her marriage to Rudolph Valentino; Rambova was adopted by her stepfather, millionaire perfume mogul Richard Hudnut, making her legal name Winifred Hudnut; Rambova was sent to a strict British boarding-school, where she proved especially gifted at ballet; in New York, she studied under the Russian ballet dancer and choreographer Theodore Kosloff in his Imperial Russian Ballet Company and adopted the name Natacha Rambova; when Kosloff was hired by Cecil B. DeMille as a performer and costume designer for Hollywood films, Rambova carried out much of the creative work as well as the historical research (Kosloff would steal her sketches and claim credit for them as his own); when Kosloff started work for fellow-Russian film producer Alla Nazimova at Metro Pictures Corporation (later MGM), he sent Rambova to present some designs; Nazimova requested some alterations, and was most impressed when Rambova was able to make these changes immediately in her own hand. so she offered Rambova a position on her production staff as an art director and costume designer; Rambova's first film for Nazimova was Billions (1920), followed by Uncharted Seas (1921), on which she first met Rudolph Valentino, and the two of them worked together on Camille; they married on May 13, 1922 in Mexicali, Mexico, and legally remarried on March 14, 1923; in 1925, they went through an acrimonious divorce; Rambova produced and starred in her own picture, Do Clothes Make the Woman? with Clive Brook; when the distributor took the opportunity to bill her as 'Mrs Valentino' and changed the title to When Love Grows Cold; she was mortally offended and never worked in film again; from 1927 Rambova ran an elite couture shop on Fifth Avenue, until she met her second husband Alvaro de Urzaiz, a British-educated Spanish aristocrat in 1934, and they went to live on the island of Mallorca; during the Spanish Civil War, Rambova fled to Nice, where she suffered a heart attack at age 40; she and Urzaiz divorced in 1939; Rambova remained in France until the Nazi invasion, when she returned to New York; her interest in the metaphysical grew during the 1940s, and she supported the Bollingen Foundation, through which she believed she could see a past life in Egypt; she published articles on healing and astrology, and helped decipher ancient scarabs and tomb inscriptions, which led her to edit a series titled Egyptian Texts and Religious Representations; she also conducted classes in her apartment about myths, symbolism and comparative religion; in the mid-1960s she was struck with scleroderma, and became malnourished and delusional as a result; a cousin brought her to Pasadena, California where she died of a heart attack at the age of 69; her ashes were scattered in Arizona; other names: Natasha Rambova)
