Dancing With The Stars

Borine International is pleased to present the artwork of Alexandra Bokhara. Late wife of Norman Borine, author of Dancing With The Stars.

Artist Bio - by William & Catherine Hemmerdinger Gallery

Born: July 15, 1898, Toulouse, France
Name: Mimi De Vullioud
Mother: Pauline Von Stohrer, Fashion Designer at the Court of France
Father: Henri De Vullioud, Translater, Custom Book Binder, World Traveler

As a child she visited the great art galleries in Paris, played in the Black Forest near Stuttgart, Germany and climbed mountains in Switzerland. She was fascinated by the people and small shops and bazaars in Algiers and Morocco. She rode camels, slept in tents and under the stars in the deserts of Egypt. She claimed the pyramids and the Sphinx were her personal possessions.

She arrived in the United States in 1912 with a grandmother on her father's side after her father was killed in an accident. Her mother was visiting in Buenos Aires, South America , at the time and never returned.

At the age of 14 in Los Angeles, she was enrolled in ballet school with Theodore Koslof. Later, she was chosen to dance for Vaslav Nijinsky during his only Los Angeles appearance.

She began her film career as a dancer and actress at Paramount and was almost immediately "adopted" by Ethel Clayton (star) and "Uncle George Melford" (director). She later became one of the Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties and assumed the name of Mimi La Marr.

She lived some interim years in Buenos Aires and with her mother and then with a sister in Algiers. In 1940, she married Norman Borine in Los Angeles. Mr. Borine was a dancer-choreographer at MGM and other major studios. Borine (Left) and Bokhara (Center) pictured at right.

She organized an all-male dance troupe and performed authentic African dances using mostly exchange students from the University of California. She had no formal training as an artist and only began to paint after retirement at the age of 65. She did not paint to be commercial and only on her death bed did she ask her husband to show her work to the world.

She died May 10, 1985

Alexndra has one prominent showing at the Bognar Galleries in 1966. The invitation to the opening read

"to view the paintings of Alexandra Bokhara is an exotic experience into a personal and sensuous world of imagination. The same creative quality which made her a great dancer and fine actress has incorporated itself into a perpetual flow of movement, transporting the viewer into a realm of continuous and ever-changing pattern.

Her extensive body of work will soon be available for sale to interested collectors and dealers.

To view a sample of this wonderful artist's work, visit our online gallery.

If you are interested in acquiring works by Alexandra Bokhara,
please contact us.