George Gaynes died at the home of his daughter, Iya Gaynes Falcone Brown, in North Bend, Washington, on February 15. He was 98. Gaynes was a resident of Santa Barbara for many years.
Gaynes was born George Jongejans in Helsinki on May 16, 1917. His father, Gerrit Jongejans, was a Dutch citizen, while his mother, Iya Grigorievna Gay, was Russian. The marriage took place under the shadow of the recent Bolshevik uprising. Gaynes’s mother was the daughter of an aristocratic theater artist and producer working in St. Petersburg. When Gaynes was a child, his mother supplemented the rich culture of the Paris home she shared with her second husband, the Baronet Sir Robert Abdy, by sending her son to a British boarding school. Admitted to Eton in 1929, Gaynes instead matriculated at a private college in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he lived for seven years with a Swiss family. When Gaynes graduated, he moved to Milan, Italy, to begin a career as an opera singer.
Inspired by the example of the great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin, and advised no doubt by his mother and her coterie of artistic friends, Gaynes planned to train his bass-baritone voice and enter on a career as an opera singer. For three years, this strategy worked well, and Gaynes made his operatic debut early in 1940. By May of that year, however, his Dutch passport had become a liability in Milan, and Gaynes left Italy on June 9, the day before that country declared war on France and the United Kingdom.
