Plot

An opportunistic businessman tries to pass off a mysterious impostor as the Grand Duchess Anastasia, and she is so convincing that even the biggest skeptics believe her.

Russian exiles in Paris plot to collect ten million pounds from the Bank of England by grooming a destitute, suicidal girl to pose as heir to the Russian throne. While Bounin is coaching her he comes to believe she is really Anastasia. In the end the Empress must decide her claim.—Ed Stephan <stephan@cc.wwu.edu>

1928. Despite the official records stating that all of Russian Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra's children were executed along with them in 1918 during the revolution, rumors have abounded that the youngest daughter, the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, managed to escape and is thus still alive. As such, a £10 million inheritance has been kept for her in the Bank of England. With this fact in mind, Sergei Bounine, a former Russian general in the Tsar's army and now a Parisian restaurateur, and two of his Russian associates, Boris Chernov and Piotr Petrovin, have long hatched a plan to access that money: find a young woman to impersonate Anastasia. Bounine thinks he's found the perfect woman when another of his associates spots someone on the streets of Paris who has more than a passing resemblance to what most people probably believe Anastasia would look like. She also has some remarkable characteristics similar to Anastasia. The issue with this woman is that she is an amnesiac, and is despondent over that fact. She is a willing participant more so truly to discover who she is, Anastasia or not. In that alternate life so that she can move around easily, they rechristen her Anna Koreff. In accessing that £10 million, they will have not only to convince Prince Paul von Haraldberg, who was once engaged to Anastasia, but more importantly Anastasia's grandmother, the Dowager Empress, who has had many an "Anastasia" paraded in front of her in the intervening ten years. As Bounine and Anna progress with transforming her into Anastasia for the world to see, they may come to reach different motivations than the ones they began with.—Huggo

Could an amnesiac refugee named Anna Anderson truly be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, purported sole survivor of the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1918, and therefore the rightful heir to the Czar's fortune? Backed by a group of White Russian exiles led by General Bounine, she faces her possible grandmother, the imperious Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, and the fortune-hunting Prince Paul.—Jwelch5742

Could an amnesiac refugee named Anna Anderson (Ingrid Bergman) truly be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, purported sole survivor of the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1918, and therefore the rightful heir to the Czar's fortune? Backed by a group of White Russian exiles led by General Bounine (Yul Brynner), she faces her possible grandmother, the imperious Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna (Helen Hayes), and the fortune-hunting Prince Paul (Ivan Desny).—FilmsNow

This is an example of a weak British play turned into a much-admired Oscar and Bafta winning movie by screenwriter Arthur Laurents, director Anatole Litvak and composer Alfred Newman. Russian emigres living in Paris and Copenhagen ten years after the Tsar was executed during the First World War were historically drawn into an extortion scheme to draw on one of the family's unclaimed ten million pound bank accounts in the form of war reparations. .Yul Brynner is a player in the extortion scheme. As the group's window of opportunity to cop the lolly is drawing to a close, he boxes homeless woman, Ingrid Bergman, into being the claimant asking for fiscal executorship to draw on the ten million pound bank account. Because the players and their sycophants do not seem to be able to generate the legal paperwork to prepare the civil suit to claim the lolly, the second half draws into it a recluse widow played by Helen Hayes, whom they believe will be able to sort it out. What none in the group, least of all Yul Brynner, expects is that two of Hollywood's most admired stars, Ingrid Bergman and Helen Hayes, are given character blocking to exhibit loose cannon personalities who purposefully blow everything up at every turn, and also light up the screen with heart-rending performances as foils to Brynner's charismatic presence and powerful gut determination to extort money. Following their powerful confrontations which take up much of the second half, Bergman and Hayes disappear from the action to prepare, offscreen, a formal diplomatic reception to which the press will be invited to witness Hayes' proclamation of support for Bergman's civil suit petition to cop the ten million pound lolly so Brynner can distribute some of it to each cohort. Everyone gets a surprise when Bergman and Hayes slyly reveal their own counterplan to spoil everything and carry it off with aplomb, even if the denoument was not very well written in the play. Bergman quietly disappears into anonymity because her identity as a homeless woman is not yet established. Hayes informs her sycophants that she merely plans to make a grand entrance, then curtly command everyone to go home because there is no civil suit.