Adriana Budevskaia

(or A. Budevska; pseudonym of A. Kyncheva Gancheva). Born Dec. 13, 1878, in Dobrich; died Dec. 9, 1955, in Sofia. Bulgarian actress. People’s Artist of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria (1953). One of the founders of realistic acting in Bulgaria.

In 1899, Budevskaia graduated from the Theatrical School of the Malyi Theater in Moscow and in the same year made her debut in Sofia in the Tears and Laughter Theater (from 1904 on, the People’s Theater). In 1904, together with a group of actors who were unhappy with the formal practices of the People’s Theater, she organized the Free Theater in Varna. In addition to staging national drama, the Free Theater produced plays by M. Gorky, L. N. Tolstoy, A. N. Ostrovskii, and H. Ibsen. In 1906 the theater closed down, and the actors returned to the People’s Theater, where Budevskaia worked until 1926. In this period Budevskaia performed her best roles in national, Russian, and foreign classical drama, including the Mother-in-law (in the play by Strashimirov), Tsena (Todorov’s Snake’s Wedding), Rada (Under the Yoke from the novel by Vazov), Nora (Ibsen’s A Doll’s House), and Ophelia and Lady Macbeth (Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth). Political persecution forced Budevskaia to move to Argentina in 1937. In 1946 she returned to her homeland.