Natacha Rambova
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Natacha Rambova (January 19, 1897 – May 6, 1966) was a costume and set designer, art director, playwright, silent-film actress, Egyptologist, collector of antiquities, and second wife of the silent film star Rudolph Valentino. She was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and died in Pasadena, California.
Rambova, a great-granddaughter of Latter-day Saint (LDS; see also Mormon) church leader Heber C. Kimball, was born to Winifred Kimball and her first husband, Michael Shaughnessy. She was not adopted by her mother's third husband, cosmetics millionaire Richard Hudnut, and was thus not, as is sometimes claimed, known as Winifred Hudnut, the name some news reports used during her lifetime. Her mother was also briefly married to Edgar Sands de Wolfe, a brother of the pioneering American interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe, whose business partner she became.
She was educated in the United States and in England, at a school recommended by her step-aunt, Elsie de Wolfe.
After a tumultuous love affair with the dancer Theodore Kosloff, with whose dance company, Kosloff's Imperial Russian Ballet, she performed, she married Rudolph Valentino on March 14, 1923, in Crown Point Lake, Indiana. (Their first marriage, in 1924, was declared bigamous because Valentino's divorce from his first wife, actress Jean Acker, had been granted but was not yet finalized.) He died in 1926.
She married her second husband, Count Alvaro de Urzaiz, a Spanish aristocrat, in 1934 and went to live on the Balearic isle of Majorca.
She worked as an art director for an extended period with Crimea-born film star Alla Nazimova (née Mariam Edez Adelaida Leventon), which whom she is often asserted, though evidence is lacking, to have had a lesbian relationship.
In 1912, Rambova gave the Utah Museum of Art a large collection of Egyptian artifacts, and she would also edit books about Egyptian art for the Bollingen Foundation. Her collection of Nepali and Lamaistic art now belongs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.