Ganna Walska was born Hanna Puacz in 1887  in Brest-Litovsk, at the time part of the Russian Empire and now in Belarus along the Polish border.

Walska pursued a career as an opera singer. Her memoirs were called Always Room at the Top. Orson Welles claimed that McCormick’s lavish promotion of Walska’s opera career—despite her apparent renown as a terrible singer—was a direct influence on the screenplay for Citizen Kane, wherein the titular character does much the same for his second wife, Susan Alexander.

Roger Ebert, in his DVD commentary on Citizen Kane, suggests that the talentless character of Alexander was based on Walska. McCormick spent thousands of dollars on voice lessons for her and even arranged for Walska to take the lead in a production of Zaza by Ruggero Leoncavallo at the Chicago Opera in 1920. Reportedly, Walska got into an argument with director Pietro Cimini during dress rehearsal and stormed out of the production before she appeared. Contemporaries said Walska had a terrible voice.

Walska was married six times. Her sixth and last husband was Theos Bernard, a scholar of yoga and Tibetan Buddhism (and book-author), divorced 1946 Career Walska pursued a career as an opera singer.

Lotusland
In 1941, with the encouragement of Bernard, she purchased the historic 37-acre (0.15 km2) ‘Cuesta Linda’ estate in Montecito near Santa Barbara, California, intending to use it as a retreat for Tibetan monks. Because of restrictions on wartime visas, the monks were unable to come to the United States. After her divorce from Bernard in 1946, Walska changed the name of her estate to “Lotusland” (after a famous flower held sacred in Indian and Tibetan religions, the lotus, Nelumbo nucifera) and the lotus growing in several of her garden’s ponds. She devoted the rest of her life to redesigning, expanding, and maintaining the estate’s innovative and extensive gardens. Her landscape design talent is well regarded for distinctive gardens of exceptional creativity.

Ganna Walska died March 2, 1984 at Lotusland, leaving her garden and her fortune to the Ganna Walska Lotusland Foundation.