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Ganna Walska (born Hanna Puacz on June 26, 1887 – March 2, 1984) was a Polish opera singer and garden enthusiast who created the Lotusland botanical gardens at her mansion in Montecito, California. She was married six times, four times to very wealthy husbands. The lavish promotion of her lackluster opera career by her fourth husband, Harold Fowler McCormick, inspired aspects of the screenplay for ''Citizen Kane''. ==Biography== Ganna Walska was born Hanna Puacz on 26 June 1887 in Brest-Litovsk, Russian Empire to Napoleon Puacz and Karolina Massalska.〔Pinkowski Files – a database of American Polonia http://www.poles.org/db/w_names/Walska_G.html〕 Ganna is a Russian form of Hannah, and Walska "reminiscent of her favorite music, the waltz".〔About Madame Walska http://www.lotusland.org/about-us/about-madame-walska〕 In 1922, after her marriage to Harold F. McCormick, Ganna Walska purchased the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. She told the ''Chicago Tribune'' that she had invested her own funds, not those of her wealthy husband, and said, "I will never appear in my own theatre until I have gained recognition based solely on my merits as an artist."〔"Walska Buys Theatre." ''The New York Times'', December 15, 1922〕 Walska pursued a career as an opera singer. The lavish promotion of her opera career by McCormick—despite her apparent renown as a terrible singer—inspired aspects of the screenplay for Orson Welles's ''Citizen Kane''.〔Welles, Orson, and Peter Bogdanovich, ''This is Orson Welles''. New York: HarperCollins Publishers 1992 ISBN 0-06-016616-9 page 49〕 Roger Ebert, in his DVD commentary on ''Citizen Kane,'' suggests that the character of Susan Alexander was based on Walska. McCormick spent thousands of dollars on voice lessons for her and even arranged for Walska to take the lead in a production of ''Zazà'' by Ruggero Leoncavallo at the Chicago Opera in 1920. Reportedly, Walska got into an argument with director Pietro Cimini during dress rehearsal and stormed out of the production before she appeared. Contemporaries said Walska had a terrible voice, pleasing only to McCormick. ''New York Times'' headlines of the day read, "Ganna Walska Fails as Butterfly: Voice Deserts Her Again When She Essays Role of Puccini's Heroine" (January 29, 1925), and "Mme. Walska Clings to Ambition to Sing" (July 14, 1927). "According to her 1943 memoirs, ''Always Room at the Top,'' Walska had tried every sort of fashionable mumbo jumbo to conquer her nerves and salvage her voice," reported ''The New York Times'' in 1996. "Nothing worked. During a performance of Giordano's ''Fedora'' in Havana she veered so persistently off key that the audience pelted her with rotten vegetables. It was an event that Orson Welles remembered when he began concocting the character of the newspaper publisher's second wife for ''Citizen Kane''." In 1926 Walska purchased the Duchess of Marlborough Fabergé egg that had been offered by Consuelo Vanderbilt at a charity auction. It was later acquired by Malcolm Forbes as the first Easter egg in his Fabergé egg collection.〔(Faberge – Treasures of Imperial Russia ) (retrieved January 16, 2012)〕 Ganna Walska died on March 2, 1984 at Lotusland, leaving her garden and her fortune to the Ganna Walska Lotusland Foundation.〔(Ganna Walska Lotusland Foundation )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ganna Walska」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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