Alisa Georgyevna Koonen , also known as Alice Coonen ( – August 20, 1974), was a Russian

Russian Empire

The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...

 and Soviet

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 actress and the wife of the director Alexander Tairov

Alexander Tairov

Alexander Tairov was one of the leading innovators of theatrical art, and one of the most enduring theatre directors in Russia, and through the Soviet era.-Childhood:...

.

Koonen was born in Moscow

Moscow

Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

 in a family of Belgian origin. At age 16 she joined the Moscow Art Theatre

Moscow Art Theatre

The Moscow Art Theatre is a theatre company in Moscow that the seminal Russian theatre practitioner Constantin Stanislavski, together with the playwright and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, founded in 1898. It was conceived as a venue for naturalistic theatre, in contrast to the melodramas...

 and studied with Stanislavski. She first appeared on the stage in Woe from Wit

Woe from Wit

Woe from Wit is Alexander Griboyedov's comedy in verse, satirizing the society of post-Napoleonic Moscow, or, as a high official in the play styled it, "a pasquinade on Moscow."The play, written in 1823 in the countryside and in Tiflis, was not passed by the censorship for the stage, and...

in 1906. At 19 she had her first major role, Mytyl in The Blue Bird (1908); she also performed Masha in Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...

’s The Living Corpse

The Living Corpse

The Living Corpse is a Russian play by Leo Tolstoy. Although written around 1900, it was only published shortly after his death—Tolstoy had never considered the work finished...

and Anitra in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt

Peer Gynt

Peer Gynt is a five-act play in verse by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, loosely based on the fairy tale Per Gynt. It is the most widely performed Norwegian play. According to Klaus Van Den Berg, the "cinematic script blends poetry with social satire and realistic scenes with surreal ones"...

.

In 1913 Koonen moved to the Free Theatre of Konstantin Mardzhanov

Kote Marjanishvili

Konstantine "Kote" Marjanishvili also known by the Russified name Konstantin Aleksandrovich Mardzhanov was a Georgian theater director regarded as an important contributor to the pre- and post-revolutionary evolution of Georgian, Russian and Soviet stages...

, which lasted only one season. There she met and married Tairov, and in 1914 they created the Chamber Theater, where she became a leading actress. She had a wide range, but became best known as a tragic actress; Marc Slonim called her "an unusually talented interpreter of tragic parts, endowed with a rich voice and rhythmic power." After the Bolshevik Revolution, in 1918 Tairov "presented Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

's Salomé

Salome (play)

Salome is a tragedy by Oscar Wilde.The original 1891 version of the play was in French. Three years later an English translation was published...

to haggard, starved audiences who jammed the frozen hall"; Koonen was "a passionate, aggressive Salomé." In 1949, Koonen left the theater with her husband, who died the following year.

According to The Great Soviet Encyclopedia

Great Soviet Encyclopedia

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia is one of the largest and most comprehensive encyclopedias in Russian and in the world, issued by the Soviet state from 1926 to 1990, and again since 2002 .-Editions:There were three editions...

, her most outstanding role was the Woman Commissar in Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s Optimistic Tragedy (1933); her other great roles included the heroine of Scribe

Eugène Scribe

Augustin Eugène Scribe , was a French dramatist and librettist. He is best known for the perfection of the so-called "well-made play" . This dramatic formula was a mainstay of popular theater for over 100 years.-Biography:...

 and Legouvé

Ernest Legouvé

Gabriel Jean Baptiste Ernest Wilfrid Legouvé was a French dramatist.-Biography:Son of the poet Gabriel-Marie Legouvé , he was born in Paris. His mother died in 1810, and almost immediately afterwards his father was removed to a lunatic asylum. The child, however, inherited a considerable fortune,...

’s Adrienne Lecouvreur, Abbie in Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish...

’s Desire Under the Elms

Desire Under the Elms

Desire Under the Elms is a play by Eugene O'Neill, published in 1924, and is now considered an American classic. Along with Mourning Becomes Electra, it represents one of O'Neill's attempts to place plot elements and themes of Greek tragedy in a rural New England setting. It is essentially a...

and Ella in his The Hairy Ape

The Hairy Ape

-Plot :The play tells the story of a brutish, unthinking laborer known as Yank, as he searches for a sense of belonging in a world controlled by the rich...

, Ellen in Sophie Treadwell

Sophie Treadwell

Sophie Treadwell , was a leading American playwright and journalist of the first half of the 20th century. Among her prominent works are Machinal and Intimations For Saxophone...

's Machinal

Machinal

Machinal is a play written by American playwright and journalist Sophie Treadwell, inspired by the real life case of convicted and executed murderess Ruth Snyder...

, Katerina in Alexander Ostrovsky's The Storm, the title role in the stage adaptation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary is Gustave Flaubert's first published novel and is considered his masterpiece. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life...

, and Kruchinina in Ostrovsky’s Guilty Without Fault (Bez viny vinovatye). Her concert repertoire included verses by Alexander Blok

Alexander Blok

Alexander Alexandrovich Blok was a Russian lyrical poet.-Life and career:Blok was born in Saint Petersburg, into a sophisticated and intellectual family. Some of his relatives were literary men, his father being a law professor in Warsaw, and his maternal grandfather the rector of Saint Petersburg...

 and Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches, is a milestone of Russian Realism, and his novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century...

 as well as selections from Chamber Theater productions.

Koonen died in Moscow and was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery

Novodevichy Cemetery

Novodevichy Cemetery is the most famous cemetery in Moscow, Russia. It is next to the 16th-century Novodevichy Convent, which is the city's third most popular tourist site. It should not be confused with the Novodevichy Cemetery in Saint Petersburg....

.