Nato Vachnadze

Natalia "Nato" Vachnadze, born Natalia Andronikashvili, (14 June 1904 – 14 June 1953) was a Georgian and Soviet film actress. She started her career in the silent film era, usually playing the screen character of an Ingénue, an innocent and passionate young woman. She continued to work as an actress during the sound era until her death in a plane crash in 1953. One of the first film stars of the Soviet Union she received numerous honors, including the title of People's Artist of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Stalin Prize. Biography Nato Vachnadze was born in Warsaw, then in the Russian Empire as the daughter of a Georgian father George Andronikov from the Andronikashvili family and a Polish mother Ekaterina Slivitskaya. Her father, an officer in the Russian army, was killed in a skirmish with a band of Chechen outlaws (abrek) in 1912. She adopted her last name from her first marriage to Merab Vachnadze, with whom she had a son, Tengiz Vachnadze (born 1926), the future architect. Her second marriage was with the film director Nikoloz Shengelaia, with whom she had two sons, the film directors Giorgi Shengelaia and Eldar Shengelaia. Her third marriage was with the Soviet navy captain Anatoli Kacharava (1910–1982). Nato Vachnadze's younger sister, Kira (1908–1960), also became an actress and married the writer Boris Pilnyak. Although several versions of her discovery for the film exist, the most popular and likely is that the film director Shakro Berishvili noticed her photography in a photo studio in Tbilisi. He managed to find her in Kakheti and convinced to play in her first film, the 1923 adventure film Arsen the Bandit. The role of Nunu in the 1923 film Patricide and the role of Esma in the 1924 film Three Lives made her famous not only in the Georgian Union Republic, but all over the Soviet Union. In these films her screen character was that of an Ingénue, an innocent and passionate young woman. The theater and film director Kote Marjanishvili gave Vachnadze two challenging roles in the experimental films The Gadfly and Amok adapted from novels by Ethel Voynich and Stefan Zweig.