Trivia

Official Russian records state that she died of the Spanish flu during the pandemic of 1919. While that seems quite likely, there is much speculation around her death. It was claimed that she was poisoned by the French ambassador with whom she reportedly had an affair and who believed that she was a spy for the Bolsheviks.

Newsreel cameras captured Kholodnaya's open casket funeral in Odessa. This footage has been more widely seen than any of her surviving films.

As a leading pop culture symbol of Russia's late Czarist era, Kholodnaya was discredited and her films banned by the new Soviet government. When Odessa's First Christian Cemetery, where she was buried, was razed in 1931, the authorities ignored her family's pleas to move her remains to Moscow and her grave was unceremoniously destroyed. Over 70 years later a cenotaph for Kholodnaya was placed at the Second Christian Cemetery in Odessa. It is a replica of her lost original tombstone, based on old photographs.

In 1918 director Konstantin Stanislavski invited Kholodnaya to join his prestigious Moscow Art Theatre. This would've given her relative stability during the harsh Civil War years, but she remained faithful to film producer Dmitri Kharitonov and moved with his studio to Odessa, Ukraine. She died there from Spanish flu a few months later.

Her husband, Vladimir Kholdny, died 2 months after her. Her mother, Yekaterina Sleptsova, also died shortly after her.

Had two daughters with her husband Vladimir Kholodny - Eugenia Kholodnaya (b.1912) and Nonna Kholodnaya (adopted her in 1913).

She was the first star of Russian silent cinema.

Though she only made films for three years, it was enough for her to become the "Queen of Screen", as she was titled. Unluckily, only five films starring her are extant nowadays out of the 50-80 films she made.

Her life was dramatized in Nikita Mikhalkov's A Slave of Love (1976). A documentary on her life was filmed in 1992. A year later, her image was depicted on a postage stamp and in 2003 a life-size bronze statue of her was erected in Odessa, Ukraine; created by artist Alexander P. Tokarev.

In 1910 she married Vladimir Kholodny, said to be one of the first Russian car racers and the editor of a daily sport newspaper. She would often accompany him in races which resulted in road accidents. She also adopted his surname, which translates to "the cold one". Later, many took it for a well-chosen pseudonym. Their daughter Evgeniya was born in 1912, and they adopted another child a year later.