Olga Baclanova

Russian actress Olga Baclanova as “Cleopatra”, and Harry Earles as “Hans”, in Tod Browning’s Pre-Code American controversial horror film ‘Freaks’ (1932), also starring starring Wallace Ford as “Phroso”, Leila Hyams as “Venus”, Rosco Ates as “Roscoe”, Henry Victor as “Hercules”, Daisy Earles as “Frieda”, and Rose Dione as “Madame Tetrallini”. The screenplay was adapted from “Spurs", a 1923 story by Tod Robbins.

The film also featured, in the supporting cast of carnival sideshow performers, Daisy and Violet Hilton as the ‘Siamese twins’ (conjoined twins), Schlitzie as both himself and as “Samuel Whiskers”, Josephine Joseph as ‘Half Woman-Half Man’, Johnny Eck as ‘Half-Boy’, Frances O'Connor as ‘Armless girl’, Peter Robinson as ‘Human skeleton’, Olga Roderick as ‘Bearded lady’, Koo Koo as herself, Prince Randian as ‘The Living Torso’, Angelo Rossitto as ´Angeleno’, Martha Morris as Angeleno's armless wife, Elvira Snow as ‘Pinhead Pip’, Jenny Lee Snow as ‘Pinhead Zip’, Elizabeth Green as ‘Bird Girl’, and Edward Brophy and Matt McHugh as the ‘Rollo Brothers’.

In the film, when trapeze artist “Cleopatra” (Olga Baclanova) learns that the circus carnival performer ‘little person’ “Hans” (Harry Earles) has an inheritance, she marries the lovesick, diminutive performer, all the while planning to steal his fortune and run off with her lover, strong man “Hercules” (Henry Victor). When Hans' friends and fellow performers discover what is going on, they band together and carry out a brutal revenge that leaves Hercules and Cleopatra knowing what it truly means to be a carnival sideshow “freak”.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cut 25 minutes out of the final cut before release that the studio considered to be too shocking, and yet the cut film was still too shocking and controversial for audiences, and, at the time, the film was a critical and financial failure. The film was considered tasteless and cruelly exploitive of differently abled people.

But after ‘Freaks’ (1932) was reintroduced three decades later at the Venice Film Festival in 1962, the film soon became very popular again, and since then has become a celebrated cult classic. In deed, today a number of modern critics argue that the film, rather than being cruelly exploitive of differently abled people, is actually sympathetic and supportive of the plights of differently anled people.

Olga Baklanova (19 August, 1893 – 6 September, 1974), sometimes referred to by the single moniker as “Baclanova”, was a Russian-born actress who found success in Hollywood films, as well as stage roles in the The States and in the United Kingdom. She was often billed as an exotic blonde temptress, who was given the title of the "Russian Tigress". Remembering the late actress Olga Baklanova.