Olga Konstantinovna Chekhova (; ; 14 April 1897 – 9 March 1980), known in Germany as Olga Tschechowa, was a Russian-German actress. Her film roles include the female lead in Alfred Hitchcock's Mary (1931). Biography Olga Konstantinovna Knipper was born on 14 April 1897, the daughter of Konstantin Knipper (1868–1929), a railway engineer, and Yelena Luise "Lulu" Knipper (née Ried, 1874–1940), both Lutherans of ethnic German ancestry. Olga was the niece and namesake of Olga Knipper (Anton Chekhov's wife). She went to school in Tsarskoye Selo but, after watching Eleonora Duse, joined the Moscow Art Theatre's studio. There she met the Russian-Jewish actor Mikhail Chekhov (Anton's nephew) in 1914 and married him the same year, taking his surname as her own. Their daughter, also named Olga, was born in 1916. She became an actress under the name of Ada Tschechowa. During the year of the 1917 October Revolution, Chekhova divorced her husband but kept his name. In the first year of the revolution, she joined a cabaret-theatre group called Sorokonozhka (The Little Centipede), as the troupe consisted of twenty members and only forty feet. Chekhova also was given a part in a silent movie, Anya Kraeva. The following year, in 1918, she was given roles in Cagliostro and in The Last Adventure of Arsène Lupin. Although part of the social circle around the Moscow Art Theatre, she never played a role there, despite her later claims to having her first theatre role in The Cherry Orchard. She managed to get a travel passport from the Soviet government, possibly in exchange for her cooperation, which led to permission to leave Russia. She was accompanied by a Soviet agent on a train to Vienna, then she moved to Berlin in 1920. That same year, she married Frederick Yaroshi, though they divorced in 1921. Her first cinema role in Germany was in F. W. Murnau silent movie Schloß Vogelöd (1921). She played in Max Reinhardt's productions at UFA. She made the successful transition from silent film to talkies. In the 1930s, she rose to become one of the brightest stars of the Third Reich and was admired by Adolf Hitler. She appeared in such films as The Hymn of Leuthen although she preferred comedies. In 1936 she married for the third time, to Marcel Robbins, which ended in divorce in 1938. Joseph Goebbels A published photograph of her sitting beside Hitler at a