Unė Babickaitė (real name Uršulė) was born in the family of farmers in Laukminiškiai on April 19, 1897. After graduating from Panevėžys Marija Gymnasium, before she was even 16 years old, she decided to go to Petersburg to look for a teacher’s job. There, thanks to Balys Sruoga, she managed to get support to study at the Petrograd Imperial Conservatory, where Unė studied from 1916 to 1918. Babickaitė was nicknamed Unė (from the Latin unus - one, the only one) by Balys Sruoga. During this period, she began to appear on the professional stage, she used to appear in plays staged by Lithuanians in the society evenings. After she returned to Lithuania in 1918, she tried to establish herself as a theater director, but met the resistance and jealousy of the authorities at that time. She went to the USA in 1919. She played in theaters in New York and Washington. She also starred in three silent movies. She got the main role in the last one of them, called “The Fox Hunt”, but had to leave the filming because the financiers of the movie were not satisfied that the lover of the President of the United States was played not by an American, but by an immigrant. She married her cousin Vytautas Andrius Graičiūnas in 1924. She died suddenly of tetanus after needlestick injury on August 1, 1961. She was buried in Palėvenė cemetery, Kupiškis district. The grave was included in the Register of Cultural Property in 1993.
Reviews