Trivia

Since Mosjoukine spoke no English, he used an interpreter during the entire shooting of the film, 'Surrender.' Nevertheless, due to his extensive acting and directorial experience, he was able to intuitively follow the director's instructions with minimal input from his interpreter. With the advent of 'the talkies,' Mosjoukine's lack of linguistic skills other than Russian was profoundly detrimental to this once shining Russian and European superstar's career.

While Mosjoukine left no official progeny, French novelist Romain Gary (original name Roman Kacew) had maintained that his birth in Vilnius on 8 May 1914 was the result of an affair between his mother Nina Owczynska and the 24-year-old Ivan Mosjoukine who was on the verge of becoming the most popular leading man of Czarist cinema. At the time, Nina was a young, minor Polish-Jewish provincial actress, recently married to one Arieh Kacew. In 1960, Gary wrote a novelized autobiographical account of his mother's struggles and triumphs, La promesse de l'aube (Promise at Dawn), which became the basis for an English-language play and a French-American film. The play, Samuel A. Taylor's First Love, opened on Broadway at the Morosco Theatre on Christmas Day 1961 and closed on 13 January 1962, after 24 performances. In 1970, returning to its original title, it was adapted for the screen and directed by Jules Dassin as a vehicle for his wife Melina Mercouri (then aged 49), who played Nina. Dassin, who was 59 years old at the time, chose to play Mosjoukine himself in the single scene that the character appears in the film.

Ivan Mosjoukin, once one of the most prominent and nuanced silent movie stars of the European cinema died completely impoverished.

Ivan Mosjoukin's roles were strong restricted when the sound film arised, his accent was a handicap and his strongest point - the physical expressiveness - wasn't in demand longer.

Ivan Mosjoukin rose to the greatest Russian silent movie star in the following years and he personified the man of countless female fan's dreams with tendency to the emotional side.

His first wife was Nathalie Lissenko , a Russian actress . The second wife was a Danish actress Agnes Petersen .

After a unsuccessful excursion to Hollywood where he shot the movie "Surrender" (1927), he went to Germany where he also became a darling of the public in no time at all with movies like "Geheimnisse des Orients" (1927), "Der geheime Kurier" (1928) and "Manolescu - König der Hochstapler" (1929), but he wasn't able to continue his earlier successes in Russia and France.

Mosjoukine's most lasting contribution to the theoretical concept of film as image is the legacy of his own face in recurring representation of illusory reactions seen in Lev Kuleshov's psychological montage experiment which demonstrated the Kuleshov Effect. In 1918, the first full year of the Russian Revolution, Kuleshov assembled his revolutionary illustration of the application of the principles of film editing out of footage from one of Mosjoukine's Tsarist-era films which had been left behind when he, along with his entire film production company, departed for the relative safety of Crimea in 1917.

At the beginnings he appeared in many comical roles but soon he became established as a serious character actor.

Ivan Mosjoukine died of tuberculosis in a Neuilly-sur-Seine clinic. All available sources give his age as 49 and year of birth as 1889. However, his gravestone at the Russian cemetery in the Parisian suburb of Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois is inscribed with the year 1887.

He attended law studies but already found out his interest in the theater at this time. Ivan Mosjoukin went to Moscow where he got an engagement at the Moscow Vvedensk Volkstheater.