A closer look at Nicholas Galitzine’s ethnicity and parents
Nicholas Galitzine stumbled onto an acting career and never looked back. The athletic Englishman looked destined for a future in football or rugby until he damaged his shoulder. Galitzine gravitated to acting because it gave him an avenue to chase after a girl he desired. Nicholas told Wonderland magazine:
“There was a girl who was going up to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival who I really fancied. I did [the festival] so I could go chase this girl. And I came back with this agency.”
Galitzine’s career started with an attempted romance – and his latest Netflix film involves a romance of convenience turned real. Nicholas plays an unlucky Marine named Luke in Purple Hearts.
Nicholas’ royal Russian descendants fled Russia during the Bolshevik era
Nicholas Galitzine was born on 29th September 1994 in England to Geoffrey and Lora Galatzine. His father descends from Russian royalty, and his mother is a Greek-American.
The noble House of Galitzine was one of Russia’s most widespread noble families. By the mid-19th century, the Galitzines occupied such a vast area and owned so much property that Russian memoirist Filipp Vigel said:
“So numerous are the Golitsyns [Galitzines] that soon it will be impossible to mention any of them without the family tree at hand.”
The Galitzines’ grasp on territory, wealth, and power didn’t last long after Vigel’s protest. After the October Revolution started in 1917, the Bolsheviks hunted the Galitzines and executed them in the Gulags.
The Galitzines were one of the victims of the executions carried out by the Bolshevik secret police from 1917 to 1922. Of the many branches of the family that existed in 1917, only one survived to see the formation of the Soviet Union.
Some branches simply disappeared while others, including Nicholas’, fled to other countries as refugees. Nicholas’ descendants fled to England, where they settled and thrived.
Under the old nobility system, Nicholas’ father would have been a prince.
Galitzine’s father established a successful glass recycling business in England
The business-savvy Geoffrey was fresh off the sale of online stockbroker Share People when he thought of revolutionizing the glass recycling industry. Geoffrey had sold Share People to American Express for £30 million; he’d hoped to sell for 10 times that amount, but the dot-com crash tanked the company’s price.
While piloting his private plane, Geoffrey thought about the logistics of glass disposal in bars and restaurants. Most typical city-center restaurants needed a lorry daily to carry away waste glass bottles.
The bottles occupied a lot of space, but most of it was air. Taking out the air would increase glass carrying capacity and reduce the cost of waste disposal. He told The Times:
“It suddenly seemed obvious to me that all these heavy trucks were really carrying air inside the bottles they were collecting. Taking [the air] out at source, before it got transported to waste centers, had to be the right answer.”
Alongside two friends, Geoffrey founded Smash & Grab Glass Recycling Ltd., creators of the Little Smasher, a glass-crushing machine. Crushing glass reduced the waste volume by a massive 80%. Galitzine talked to The Times about the thinking behind his new venture:
“I was looking to do another start-up, and recycling attracted me. I felt that, of all the business models people look at all the time, waste is not going to go away and is only going to increase. There are not many businesses where you know the base product is going to increase every single year.”
Gradually, even waste-collecting companies warmed up to the idea of a glass-crushing machine. They realized fewer trips would save costs while collecting a similar amount of glass.
In May 2011, Smash & Grab Glass Recycling Ltd.’s directors accepted an acquisition offer from Specialist Waste Recycling Ltd. After the acquisition, Geoffrey worked as a consultant for Specialist Waste Recycling Ltd. for two years.
