Trivia

In January 1959 a huge scandal exploded. Le Troquer, Pinajeff and some twenty other persons were involved in the so-called 'Ballets Roses scandal'. Pinajeff supposedly had organised erotic ballets with under aged girls for an elite audience. Some of the mothers of the girls had consented to this, hoping for career perspectives for their children. The couple got away with it quite mildly because of Le Troquer's high age and his war record, but both their careers were over. Rumour has it that the whole affair was concocted by the Gaulists to discredit the socialist Le Troquer.

In the 1950's she was involved in a notorious scandal involving erotic ballets with underaged girls, the 'Ballets roses' scandal.

The actress Elisabeth Pinajeff has fallen into oblivion today.

Apparently she also appeared in the film "La tragedie imperiale" in 1937 with her pseudonym Lily Dorell.

Pinajeff was the daughter of architect Serge Pinajeff and countess Anna Popov.

Elisabeth Pinajeff withdrew to a small house in Villemoison-sur-Orge, near Paris. There she died in 1995, virtually forgotten.

In 1926 she had the female lead in the aristocratic drama Spitze'/Have an eye (Holger-Madsen, 1926) opposite Olaf Fönss, and she played the dancer Beatrice opposite Luciano Albertini in the adventure film Rinaldo Rinaldini (Max Obal, 1926-1927).

In the mid-1920s Elisabeth Pinajeff often was the second actress after the female star, and so she was destined to play the rival, as in Die Brigantin von New York (Hans Werckmeister, 1924) with Lotte Neumann , and in Herrn Philip Collins Abenteuer/Mr Philip Collins Adventure (Johannes Guter, 1925) with Georg Alexander and Ossi Oswalda .

According to Ciné-Artistes and other sources, Pinajeff had met Austrian photographer Alex Binder in 1929. Binder had the biggest photo studio in Europe in the 1920s and by 1929 he lived in Paris. Pinajeff became first his model, then his wife.

Pinajeff contributed to many silent German films, often as a classy seductress.

In the 1910s she did her studies in Kharkiv (Charkow), in Ukraine, and attended dramatic classes too.

Thanks to her connections, Pinajeff painted famous personalities such as the British Queen and the wife of president Coty. She exhibited her paintings with some success at the Salon des femmes peintres et sculpteurs(the salon for female painters und sculptors) as well as at the Galerie André Weill in Paris.

At age 19 she married an engineer. When her husband got a job in Germany, she moved there with him.

About the birth of Elisabeth Pinajeff or Elisabeth Pinajewa, our sources state different dates and locations. While Philippe Pellettier at the French website Ciné-Artistes indicates that she was born 4 April 1900 in Wilna (Vilnius), then part of the Russian Empire and now Lithuania, his German colleague Thomas Staedeli of the Cyranos website writes instead that she was born 17 April 1900 in Jekaterinoslaw, now Dnipropetrowsk in Ukraine. (She probably was born in Vilnius, and grew up in Dnipropetrowsk).

She supposedly played in two silent Russian films, but which ones is unknown.

After some years of 'radio silence', Pinajeff had a last bit part in La tragédie impériale/Rasputin (Marcel L'Herbier, 1937), a film about Siberian monk Gregory Rasputin ( Harry Baur ) and the hold he exerted over the court of the last Russian czar, Nicholas. Then Pinajeff retired from the film business and dedicated herself to painting.

She was married to famous photographer Alex Binder.

In 1950 she became the lady friend of André Le Troquer, a high placed lawyer and politician. He had been a war hero in 1914-1918 and had lost an arm there. He had also been the defender of Léon Blum during 'Vichy' and he was Chair of the National Assembly in 1954-1955 and 1956-1958.

Her film career chance came in 1921, when Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer advertised in a newspaper that he was looking for authentic Russians to play in his first German film Die Gezeichneten/Love One Another (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1921). Elisabeth Pinajeff got a small part in the film and not the female lead. The leading lady was countess Polina Piechovska, while the male lead was played by Vladimir Gajdarov .

Under the name of Lily Dorell, Pinajeff played a small part as Dolly Croquette in Vacances conjugales/Conjugal holidays (Edmond Gréville, 1933) and a substantial part in Le triangle de feu/The Triangle of Fire (Edmond Gréville, Johannes Guter, 1933).