How to Pronounce Unė Babickaitė
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May 01, 1897 Laukminiškiai, Panevėžys County, Lithuania Died on 01 Aug 1961 (aged 64)
Lithuanian actress
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About Un Babickait
- Une Babickaite-Graiciuniene (born Uršule Babickaite also known as Une Baye; April 19, 1897 near Kupiškis – August 1, 1961 in Kaunas) was a Lithuanian actress and theater director.
- She was a wife of business theorist Vytautas Andrius Graiciunas. During World War I, Babickaite and her family retreated to Saint Petersburg.
- There she met Balys Sruoga, who encouraged her to begin theater studies at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1916.
- Balys named her Une.
- After return to Lithuania, she organized theater group Daina and staged several performances.
- However, a woman director stirred up controversy in a conservative society and the plays were attacked by critics.
- In 1919, Babickaite moved to the United States, where she simplified her name to Une Baye and between 1922 and '24 appeared in several silent films by Paramount.
- She left the film industry due to a visual impairment and instead performed in the theaters in New York, Washington DC, Chicago.
- In 1924 she married Graiciunas, her cousin, and moved with him to London in 1928.
- With her husband financing her artistic endeavors, she established the New Russian Theatre, and later the Anglo-American Company Troupe, appeared in theaters in both London and Paris.
- In France she met with Konstantin Balmont, who dedicated at least four of his poems to her.
- Following serious illness, two car crashes and multiple surgeries, she joined the Third Order of Saint Francis in Italy but did not take vows.
- In 1936, she returned to Lithuania and directed plays for the šauliai (Lithuanian Riflemen's Union).After World War II, the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic became part of the Soviet Union.
- Her husband, an American citizen, was arrested in 1951 and sentenced to ten years in Gulag.
- He died the following year under unclear circumstances.
- Babickaite was also sentenced to five years.
- In 1953, during the de-Stalinization campaign after Joseph Stalin's death, she received amnesty and was allowed to return to Lithuania.
- She died in 1961 in Kaunas. Babickaite left an extensive collection of documents, correspondence, and photos, which are preserved by the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania.
- Two volumes of documents were published in 2001 and 2005.
- Various theater exhibits, collected by her, are displayed by the Lithuanian Theatre, Music and Film Museum, established by Balys Sruoga and Vincas Kreve-Mickevicius in 1926.
- The family home in Laukminiškes village, where Babickaite and her brother writer Petras Babickas were born, was turned into an ethnographic and memorial museum in 2002.
