Uzhvii, Nataliia

Uzhvii, Nataliia [Užvij, Natalija], b 8 September 1898 in Liuboml, Volodymyr-Volynskyi county, Volhynia gubernia, d 29 July 1986 in Kyiv. (Photo: Nataliia Uzhvii.) Stage and film actress. She studied and acted in the Shevchenko First Theater of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic (1922–5) and then acted in the Odesa Derzhdrama (1925–6), Berezil (1926–34; later the Kharkiv Ukrainian Drama Theater), and the Kyiv Ukrainian Drama Theater (from 1936). In Berezil she played a wide range of roles (from heroic to character), including Sadie in J. Colton and C. Randolph's Sadie Thompson (based on S. Maugham's Rain, 1926), Auntie Motia in Mykola Kulish's Myna Mazailo (1929), and Larysa in Myroslav Irchan's Pliatsdarm (The Battle Zone, 1932). Elsewhere she played Elizabeth in Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller's Don Carlos (1936), Beatrice in William Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing (1940), and many leading female characters in dramas by Oleksander Korniichuk, Oleksander Levada, Mykola Ya. Zarudny, and other Soviet playwrights. She also starred in the films Taras Shevchenko (1926), Taras Triasylo (1927), and Raiduha (The Rainbow, 1943). Biographies of Uzhvii, by R. Bernatska (1958) and Yosyp Kyselov (1978), were published in Kyiv.