Elvira Amazar (1890s – February 7, 1971), also known as Vera Amazar or Elaine Amazar, was a Serbian-born Russian-American soprano singer and actress. She was also the subject of the first photograph described as "cheesecake", in 1917.
Early life
Elvira Amazar was born in Serbia. Her father was a mining engineer. She was orphaned as a small girl, when both parents died during a strike. Relatives in Poland took her in, and she was educated in Germany and Moscow. She studied music in Paris and Milan.[1] Among her teachers were Félia Litvinne and Umberto Masetti.[2]
Career
Amazar began her singing career at the Marinskiy Theater in St. Petersburg (Petrograd), Russia, in Il Pagliacci by Leoncavallo [3] and found further success in Monte Carlo and Milan. She moved to the United States during World War I, a member of the Boston National Opera Company[4] and a client of the Bel Canto Music Bureau.[5] She sued her lover, baritone Georges Baklanoff, for an assault while they were on a Pacific Coast tour in 1917.[6] They later reached a settlement.[7]
A print advertisement for As a Man Thinks (1919), describing the seductive model character played by Amazar
Amazar appeared in three silent films, The Volcano (1919), As a Man Thinks (1919),[8] and L'Aviateur Masqué (1922). She had a cabaret act in Paris in 1920.[9]
In 1917 she appeared in Ziegfeld's Follies of 1917.[10] In 1925, Amazar was in the cast of another revue, Sinners of 1925, in New York.[11] In 1927 and 1928, she was in the cast of Blossom Time, an operetta based loosely on the life of composer Franz Schubert.[12][13]
"Cheesecake"
Amazar was known for wearing short skirts and high heels,[14] and is often mentioned in connection with the term "cheesecake". As the story goes,[15] in 1915, Amazar raised her skirt to show some of her bare leg for a photograph.[16] The photographer was George Miller. Miller's editor liked the image enough to declare it "better than cheesecake," and the word "cheesecake" became a term for photographs of attractive young women baring some skin.[17]
Personal life
Elvira Amazar was involved with a married colleague, George Baklanoff, for several years.[18] (His wife and children lived in Russia.) Her claims that he deceived her into traveling with him[19] led to their arrests in Chicago, under the Mann Act, in 1920.[20][21] The couple left for Paris soon after they were charged;[22] Baklanoff was allowed to re-enter the United States in 1921,[23] and the deportation orders were dropped by 1922.[24] She became a citizen of the United States in 1929.[25]
She had a daughter, Tatiana Amazar (1911-1979), born in Russia, who became a cookbook author and food editor.[26] Elvira Amazar died in New York City in 1971, in her seventies.[27]
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