Ryszard Bolesławski (February 4, 1889 - January 17, 1937),was a Polish film director, actor and teacher of acting.

Inventing a stage name "Boleslawski" (later spelled also "Boleslavsky"), the young Pole Boleslaw Ryszard Szrednicki left his second home (Odessa, Russian Empire) to study theatre and train as an actor at the world-famous Moscow Art Theatre, before and during WW1. He also acted in a few early Russian films. In the chaotic wake of the Russian Revolution, Civil War, and then Soviet Russia's war with Poland (1918-21), Boleslawski left Russia forever, migrated through Poland and Germany, and wound up in the USA. In the 1920s he became, along with Maria Ouspenskaya, one of the first teachers in the US of the serious, emotionally grounded, ensemble style of the Moscow Art Theatre (later known as the "Method"). To put his thespic theories into action, Boleslawski created the "American Laboratory [Stage] Theatre" in New York in 1923. (Forerunner of the "Group Theatre" of the 1930s and "Actor's Studio" after WW2.) Boleslawski also wrote serious theoretical articles about acting for "Theatre Arts Magazine," and later collected them in a 1933 book, "Acting -- the First Six Lessons." The coming of sound to motion pictures, and the financial collapse of the American Laboratory Theatre, led Boleslawski to abandon the New York stage and to accept an offer to direct films in Hollywood, beginning in 1929. He made several important films at major studios like MGM and Fox before his premature death in January, 1937. Among his most important film-directing assignments were "Rasputin & the Empress" (with the 3 Barrymores), "Men in White" (Gable & Loy), "Painted Veil," (Garbo), "Les Miserables (March & Laughton), and "Theodora Goes Wild" (Irene Dunne) -- a wide range of genres. He even directed a musical, "Metropolitan" (Tibbett) and a cowboy film, "Three Godfathers" (Chester Morris). Boleslawski-Boleslavsky was married at least 3 times. From his last marriage, to pianist-actress Norma (Drury) Boleslavsky, he had one child, a son named Jan (1935-1962), who tragically was to lose his father before he was two years old, and then to lose his own life at the tender age of 27. Richard Boleslawski's death of cardiac arrest, at the age of 47, before he had completed his final film ("Last of Mrs Cheyney" with Joan Crawford) was shockingly sudden, and from unclear causes. One explanation, probably incorrect, traces his fatal illness to his penultimate film, "Garden of Allah" (with Dietrich), the exteriors of which he shot in the burning heat of the Southwest desert. At some point, it is claimed, Boleslawski unwisely "drank the (unboiled) water," rather than soft drinks and bottled water (as the company had been advised to do). From which he allegedly fell ill, and eventually expired at 47.