Galia Ann Ell 1937-2021 Galia Ann Ell was born of Russian ancestry in Kobe, Japan, on Sept. 5, 1937, to Olga and Anatoli Bendersky. She lived her early childhood years in Tientsin, China, with her family until the Japanese invasion. Her father, who was the distributor for Warner Bros. films for all of Asia, was wrongfully executed when she was around 9 years old. She and her mother fled to America with the help of her second father, Irving Layton, and they settled in Hollywood.