Maria Britneva, later Lady Maria St. Just was a Russian-British actress who was a friend of Tennessee Williams and co-trustee of the trust which Williams had set up for his hospitalised sister, Rose.
Life and career
Maria Britneva was born in Petrograd in the Soviet Union. When she was 13 months old, her mother emigrated to England with her and her brother Vladimir, and she was raised in Hammersmith. She represented her paternal grandfather as having been court physician at Tsarskoye Selo and her father as having been murdered in the Soviet purges shortly after she came to England, but there is no record of the former and her father, also a physician, served in the Red Army, and although he was shot by the Stalinists in 1930, was rehabilitated in 1969, while her mother was British by birth. She studied ballet with Tamara Karsavina as a child and was known as "the little grasshopper" for her ability to jump high, but could not pursue a professional career either because she was too small or because of foot trouble and, she said, overly large breasts. She instead studied acting at Michel Saint-Denis's school, and John Gielgud employed her in his London theatre company, but he and others considered her a poor actress. After meeting Tennessee Williams, she moved to New York, where she lived in a small flat in the 1950s and he arranged parts for her in performances of some of his plays; again her performances were not much praised and Williams said after her opening performance as Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire in Florida "I thought I had written a good play till I saw her in it." She appeared in five films: Peccato che sia una Canaglia ; The Scapegoat ; Suddenly, Last Summer ; A Room with a View ; and Maurice.
Friendship with Tennessee Williams
Britneva met Tennessee Williams in 1948 at a party at Gielgud's house. They became lifelong close friends—Williams wrote epitaphs for both her diabetic cousin, with whom she had been raised, and her bulldog, who always snarled at him—and she fell in love with him; she consulted a psychotherapist about the relationship and fantasized to Arthur Miller about his wanting to marry her. The biographers of Gore Vidal and James Laughlin, both of whom were close to both her and Williams, describe her as "cast herself in the role of devoted sister-caretaker" and as "Tennessee's confidant and protective demon". She often traveled with Williams and his partner Frank Merlo; at one point, he felt guilty about using her as bait to attract others. She was sometimes cruel to the other women in his life, and probably caused him to dismiss his agent Audrey Wood. She was reportedly the inspiration for the character of Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and was certainly the model for the Countess in This Is. In an article published in The New Yorker soon after her death, John Lahr wrote that he believed she reminded him of his mother. She was increasingly protective of him, going so far as to attempt to push his brother Dakin off a catwalk at the Lyceum Theatre after the Broadway opening of Out Cry in 1973; late in his life, some friends were sure she supplied him with drugs. Williams angered her by mentioning her only briefly in his 1975 memoirs, where he dismissed her as "an occasional actress" and "afflicted with folie de grandeur". At her insistence, he wrote an apology saying that editors had cut down his description of "this richly sustaining attachment". However, at the end of his life, his friendship for her was cooling. Williams named Maria St Just co-trustee of the trust for his lobotomized sister, which made her his literary executor since the copyrights to his works were vested in the trust. She fiercely defended his legacy to an extent that many found excessive, such as involving herself in casting and advising actors, denying scholars access to Williams's papers, demanding the right to vet the manuscript of the authorized biography, and rescinding permission that Williams had granted to Lyle Leverich for such a biography. She also refused permission for a biography by Margot Peters. Lahr describes her as considering herself "Williams' widow without a ring". In 1990, she published a collection of her correspondence with Williams, which was adapted for the stage by Kit Hesketh-Harvey. In the book, she changes Brooks Atkinson's review in The New York Times of her 1955 performance Off-Broadway as Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire from a pan to a rave.
In addition to Williams, she was romantically linked with James Laughlin; in 1954 they became engaged, which Williams reportedly said would for him be an "old-time happy ending" because Britneva " a similar place in heart" with Laughlin; but Laughlin broke it off. She was rumoured to have slept with Marlon Brando, and other affairs included John Huston; according to Lahr, she had an abortion in 1951. In 1956 she married Peter Grenfell, the second Lord St Just; they had two daughters. One of them had Franco Zeffirelli, another good friend, as godfather. Lord St Just died in 1986. She died in London of heart failure as a result of rheumatoid arthritis, and is buried at Wilbury House, the Grenfell estate, with her dogs rather than with her in-laws, with whom she had a bad relationship.
