- After her husband's death in 1950, she retired from film business. Her fate is unknown.
- Leading lady of the silent cinema, born in what is present day Latvia. She was trained as a ballerina and performed on the stage in Warsaw before the onset of World War I. She was discovered for the screen by the director Friedrich Zelnik. He became her mentor and husband. In her film roles, she embodied at once naivety and sex appeal, often playing charming Viennese lasses. She essentially retired from acting in 1932.
- With her celebrated sex appeal and her youthful lightness she soon belonged to the young savages who became a darling of the public.
- When her husband Friedrich Zelnik died there was not a trace of Lya Mara, her scent disappeared.
- Because Lya Mara had a good command of German since her childhood, she was able to continue her work. When finally newspaper articles and pictures of her appeared in several Berliner newspapers, she was spotted by the director Friedrich Zelnik, who summoned her to Berlin. After some screen tests she signed a contract which obligated her for a total of seven pictures with Zelnik.
- With the rise of the sound film her career drew to a close very fast.
- During World War I she stood in Warsaw and went through the invasion of the German troops.
- At the end of the 20's she became above all very famous for her performance as a typical Vienna girl and produced a real boom of Vienna movies.
- When she had a serious car accident there was a immensely huge sympathy of the audience.
- She became a solo dancer and in the following years she danced for the Rigaer State theater and became astonishingly famous. This success was crowned with her promotion to a prima ballerina in 1913.
- Lya Mara got married with Friedrich Zelnik in 1918. The couple became a popular hub for other filmworkers who met often at the house of Mara/Zelnik and polished their scripts and talked.
- Somehow Lya Mara could not adapt her acting to the new artistic conditions after the introduction of sound in cinema in 1929, while Zelnik became first director in Germany who post synchronized foreign films.
- She showed an interest in chemistry and went to the Brandsil secondary school. But her father died very early. Her single mother with six children couldn't afford the expensive school any longer and Lya Mara had to leave it.
- Lya Mara showed an other talent in her own garden. She liked to be a gardener and was famous for her rose growing.
- When Hitler took power in Germany (1933), Lya Mara left with Zelnik for London. There is no record of her acting there, in none of her husband films produced until 1939 in England and The Netherlands.
- Zelnik promoted Lya Mara to a major star in Germany as she played mainly in films he directed and produced. Since 1920 Zelnik's film production company was named Zelnik-Mara-Film GmbH.
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