Author Topic: Tatjana Angilini - Alexander III:s illegitimate granddaughter?  (Read 49540 times)

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Erika

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It is said that Alexander III was the first tsar to be faithful to his wife. Today, while reading an old book about Swedish film I came across some interesting facts. An actress named Tatyana Angelini Scheremetiew, who did the original Swedish dubs for Cinderella and Snow white, is listed as the illegitimate granddaughter of Alexander III and an Italian opera singer named Angelini. The "relationship" between these two resulted in a son, Michail Scheremetiew, who fled Russia in 1917 and became a singing teacher in Sweden. Tatyana was born in 1923 in Stockholm. She had formal music training from an early age and at age 14 she gave her voice to Snow white and later, in 1950, also to Cinderella. In her 30s she moved to the US were she toured the country with her own radio-show. She was apparently very good at languages and spoke four languages fluently; Swedish, Russian, English and French. She married twice and had two children, her daughter Michaela Jolin (born in 1958) is an acress and tv-hostess.

Has anyone heard this story before? Do you perhaps have something more to add? What do you all think about all this?




Offline Yelena Aleksandrovna

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Re: Tatjana Angilini - Alexander III:s illegitimate granddaughter?
« Reply #1 on: July 05, 2013, 11:32:03 AM »
Totally new for me Erika, thank you for sharing! As in all the stories about claims I tend to be skeptical and I also have my doubts about the authenticity of the story of this woman and her father. I don't mean that this can be impossible but many things aren't much clear for me and I want to ask you some things about her "story".... When did AIII met his alleged lover? and when was this Mikhail born? Did the woman ever claimed she was AIII's granddaughter (or did her father claim this)?
« Last Edit: July 05, 2013, 11:35:24 AM by Yelena Aleksandrovna »

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Re: Tatjana Angilini - Alexander III:s illegitimate granddaughter?
« Reply #2 on: July 05, 2013, 11:46:33 AM »
Sounds a bit odd to me.  The Cheremetiev family is an old Russian Noble Family, why would they give an illegitimate son that family name??


Erika

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Re: Tatjana Angilini - Alexander III:s illegitimate granddaughter?
« Reply #3 on: July 05, 2013, 12:02:18 PM »
I agree. I think it is extremely odd as well and I do not believe it, but it did arise my interest since these "facts" were printed in a book distributed by the "Swedish Film Institute". As I understand it, Alexander III was married but still a Grand Duke when "Mikhail" was concieved. This means that he must have been born before 1881, making him well over fifty when he fathered Tatyana. It doesn't say who claimed that she was A III:s granddaughter, but I guess she did not deny it. I will try to dig out some more.

Offline Yelena Aleksandrovna

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Re: Tatjana Angilini - Alexander III:s illegitimate granddaughter?
« Reply #4 on: July 05, 2013, 12:46:04 PM »
... As I understand it, Alexander III was married but still a Grand Duke when "Mikhail" was concieved. This means that he must have been born before 1881, making him well over fifty when he fathered Tatyana...

I googled his name and find in the site find a grave, that Mikhail was born in 1870!!! (See the site here), So he was 53 when Tatiana was born. They don't give any information about the mother of the man and just mention that he was son of AIII but they don't give more details about his "parents". :-? There aren't much references about the "story" but the very few that I could find aren't clear to me. I got to see a blog of Angeline Jolin (as I understood she is daughter of Tatiana) but she doesn't mention that AIII was related to her family and only mentions that Tatiana was born as Countess Scheremetiew, nothing else.

Thanks for your reply Erika!! Hope you can find much more!! :-)
« Last Edit: July 05, 2013, 12:55:44 PM by Yelena Aleksandrovna »

Offline Yelena Aleksandrovna

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Re: Tatjana Angilini - Alexander III:s illegitimate granddaughter?
« Reply #5 on: July 05, 2013, 01:18:11 PM »
Found an obituary of Tatiana Angelini in a Swedish newspaper online. They have a slightly different verssion -according to the translator-, the grandfather of Tatiana was in fact a Russian Grand Duke, but they don't mention his name. Here is the full article (in Swedish) and two more photos of the woman that I saved of it:



Offline jehan

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Re: Tatjana Angilini - Alexander III:s illegitimate granddaughter?
« Reply #6 on: July 05, 2013, 06:46:02 PM »
I have no more knowledge of this than anyone else here, but IMHO the surname alone makes it unlikely that this child descends from the Romanovs.  Possibly the child was an offshoot of the Sheremetevs? They were a very large, old and wealthy noble family after all, and it would be easy enough for "grandpa was a Russian Count" to become "grandpa was a Russian Grand Duke", and then claim the highest GD possible? Especially when people had only the vaguest of notions of how the Russian nobility system worked, Europe was crawling with Russian noble refugees and there was no internet for people to try to check up on such things?
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Erika

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Re: Tatjana Angilini - Alexander III:s illegitimate granddaughter?
« Reply #7 on: July 06, 2013, 10:22:52 AM »
Found some more information. According to that text, Tatjana's father Mikhail was adopted by Prince Mikhail Scheremetiew when Alexander III became tsar in 1881, and took his adopted father's last name. Sounds very odd. The mystery continues...

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Re: Tatjana Angilini - Alexander III:s illegitimate granddaughter?
« Reply #8 on: July 06, 2013, 11:12:35 AM »
Well, that puts it all to rest as fiction.  There was no "Prince" Mikhail or Michael Cheremetiev alive at the time Alexander III took the throne. The "Princely" Cheremetievs were : Prince (technically "Count") Nicholai, who had a son Dmitri, and then Dmitri's elder son Sergei and younger son Alexander.  There was a non titled branch of the family from Nizhny-Novogorod. 

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Re: Tatjana Angilini - Alexander III:s illegitimate granddaughter?
« Reply #9 on: July 06, 2013, 07:06:16 PM »
Found some more information. According to that text, Tatjana's father Mikhail was adopted by Prince Mikhail Scheremetiew when Alexander III became tsar in 1881, and took his adopted father's last name. Sounds very odd. The mystery continues...

(Allegedly) Was he adopted by his foster father until the age of 11... What do they pretend that happened with him the previous 11 years?!? Are there actually any records of an opera singer named Angelini during the 1870's? This story sounds less likely to be real while we know much more the details.

Offline Janet Ashton

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Re: Tatjana Angilini - Alexander III:s illegitimate granddaughter?
« Reply #10 on: July 07, 2013, 04:30:43 AM »
One interesting aspect to this story is the fact that a Russian emigre who wrote a number of books in the 1920s under the name "Victor Kaledin", and who claimed to be a former secret policeman and spy, said in one of his works that Alexander had had an affair with an Italian *ballerina*, though he did not say there had been a child....Kaledin was discredited - I have seen correspondence by Spiridovich pointing out that he had never held the posts he claimed - but elements of these stories seem to find their way into collective memory and somehow pop up again! The other tale Kaledin spread was the claim that Nicholas had had two kids by Kschessinska - a story knocking around since about 1900 in various publications and journals, and which Catherine Radziwil also published once or twice.
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Erika

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Re: Tatjana Angilini - Alexander III:s illegitimate granddaughter?
« Reply #11 on: October 28, 2013, 05:19:08 AM »
I found some more information, not much - but some.
According to an old book which I found among my grandma's old things, Tatianas father fled Russia in 1917 by boat. Apparently, he used his mother's surname Angelini to avoid persecution.

Offline TimM

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Re: Tatjana Angilini - Alexander III:s illegitimate granddaughter?
« Reply #12 on: November 25, 2013, 12:07:46 PM »
Looks like another one has been debunked.
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