Left with few options, she gave up on the film industry, returning to perform on Broadway, notably starring as Natalya Petrovna in Rouben Mamoulian's 1930 New York production of Turgenev's "A Month in the Country" and an acclaimed performance as Mrs. Alving in Ibsen's "Ghosts", which critic Pauline Kael described as the greatest performance she had ever seen on the American stage. In the early 1940s, she returned to films, playing Robert Taylor's mother in "Escape" (1940) and Tyrone Power's mother in "Blood and Sand" (1941). This late return to motion pictures fortunately preserves Nazimova and her art on sound film.