Anastasia

Anastasia... this Fox film was based on 50s movie that was inspired by a play based on the story of Ana Anderson who for years claimed to be the real Anastasia.

The movie is a wonderful fairy tale for children and adults but unfortunately any resemblance of that story to "reality" was purely "coincidence".

Anastasia was the fourth daughter of the Russian Tsars Nicholas and Alexandra. At that time, the crown needed a male successor and after a love match at an early age, four daughters and many pressures on Tsarina Alexandra to give birth to a son, Alexei was born with the bad luck or the consequence being hemophiliac due to consanguinity, a condition in which the patient suffers from strokes due to poor blood clotting, which endangers his life and in this case also the succession to the empire.

In any case, the tsars were caring parents who deeply loved all their children and, despite the poor prognosis of the Tsarevich, they cared for him as a delicate flower but fate willed that in a moment of despair for the child's health in the episode that seemed to be the fatal one, a dark character came into play, Rasputin.

Alexandra, a suffering mother of a sick child, clung in her desesperation to Rasputin and his "healing powers" for the well-being of her son but this would not do her any good in the long run. The condition of the Tsarevich, the war with Japan and Rasputin's mysterious ramblings in the Palace, among other things, did nothing to help the popularity of an Imperial Family that saw the rise of the Russian Revolution and was arrested in August 1917.

Eventually they were taken to the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg where the entire family and some staff members were shot on the night of July 16-17, 1918.

A couple of years later Franziska Schanzkowska was admitted to a psychiatric center after a suicide attempt. At first she was known as Fräulein Unbekannt (unknown lady), after that she would say her name was Ana Anderson to claim in 1922 that she was the Grand Duchess Anastasia. After some urban legends that told the story of the escape from the massacre of one or another of the Romanov children, the fact that one of the girls could be found alive filled family and caregivers with hope. Some believed in her, others not seeing physical resemblance, gave the benefit of the doubt due to the impact that a trauma of such magnitude could have left on her physique, but the people closest to the children would not recognize the Grand Duchess Anastasia in her and much less her aunt Olga with whom the girl would have had a special affinity. The girl's grandmother, then old and broken with pain, would not even want to see the supposed Anastasia.

In the end, after a private investigation financed by his uncle Ernst of Hesse, Anderson's true identity, Franziska Schanzkowska, became known.

Already in the 90s, the bodies of five members of the Romanov family, the parents and three daughters, were exhumed from the common grave in which they were found and scientific advances allowed their DNA, by kinship, to be compared with that of Philip of Edinburgh. By a high coincidence it was confirmed that they were the Romanovs but the lack of two bodies fed legends again until a few years later when in 2007 two corpses were exhumed from a second grave, subsequently being identified with a high probability as the bodies of the other two sons of the tsars, Maria and Alexei.

The numerous impostors claiming to be Romanov children were thus put to an end. And as for Ana Anderson ... her DNA was compared to a great-nephew of Franziska Schanzkowska (presumably herself) and matches were found on it.

Despite all the genetic tests carried out over the years, there are still those who, today, do not believe that the identified bodies are those of the Russian Imperial Family. For those the legend of Anastasia lives on.