from russia with love; Stage and film actress Olga Chekhova led a life of tantalizing glamour and murky political intrigue.

Byline: Leslie Camhi

Though Olga Chekhova was the niece by marriage of the great Russian author Anton Chekhov, the wistful melancholy that permeates his plays had little place in her demanding and turbulent life. A woman of both mesmerizing beauty and eminent practicality, she outlasted the famine and purges of the Russian Revolution in Moscow and savored a movie star's privileges in Berlin throughout the rise of Nazi Germany; as World War II ended, while other women were busy clearing the rubble of German cities, she eluded the clutches of Stalin's secret police and later became a cosmetics magnate with her own company.

In Antony Beevor's gripping new biography, The Mystery of Olga Chekhova: Was Hitler's Favorite Actress

a Russian Spy? (Viking), Chekhova's intelligence activities remain among the murkier chapters of Cold War history. She seems to have been recruited as a "sleeper" agent by her brother, Lev Knipper, a noted composer and Soviet NKVD operative, sometime around 1923, when her thriving career on the Weimar stage and screen facilitated numerous contacts. A decade later, Stalin was keen to discover the source of Hitler's magnetism. Who was better placed to ferret out such secrets than the actress Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels described in his diary as "a charming woman"?

Beevor's panoramic tome also brings to life a grandly incestuous theatrical dynasty, revolving largely around Stanislavsky's Moscow art theatre (the spiritual home of Chekhov's plays), and torn between the old order and the new exigencies of Soviet society. Olga's aunt Olya-the playwright's widow and first lady of the Russian stage-went into exile for two years following the Revolution. Lev, the family's most fervent convert to the Soviet cause, had spent his youth as a White Guard officer. And Olga's first husband, Misha-the ...