Marina Vlady — actress with roots in the Russian Empire
Marina Vlady was born Marina Catherine de Poliakoff-Baydaroff in Clichy, outside Paris, in May 1938, the youngest of four daughters of White Russian emigres - her father an opera singer, her mother a dancer. All four sisters became actresses and took stage names: Odile Versois, Helene Vallier, Olga Baidar-Poliakoff and, from her father's first name, Vlady. She was raised speaking Russian at home, and that fluency, rather than anything she acquired later, determined the shape of the rest of her life.
She began on screen as a child in 1949 and was an international name by her twenties. In 1963 she won the Best Actress award at Cannes for Marco Ferreri's The Conjugal Bed. She worked with Jean-Luc Godard on Two or Three Things I Know About Her, with Orson Welles on Chimes at Midnight, and across a career on film that ran until 2018. She sat on the jury of the Moscow International Film Festival in 1965.
It was in Moscow, two years later, that she met Vladimir Vysotsky - actor at the Taganka, and the bard whose recordings circulated in unofficial copies across the Soviet Union. They married in 1970. For ten years, until his death in 1980, she moved between Paris and Moscow on a permission regime that had to be renegotiated constantly, argued with Soviet officials on his behalf, and served as one of the few channels by which his work and his situation reached the West. She had by then been married twice before, to Robert Hossein and to Jean-Claude Brouillet, and she lived afterwards with the oncologist Leon Schwartzenberg until his death in 2003.
Her memoir of the marriage, Vladimir, ou le vol arrete, published in 1987, was a bestseller in France and, once it appeared in Russian, in Russia - where it remains one of the primary sources on Vysotsky's last years, and is still argued about.
She was married to Vysotsky for ten years, until his death in 1980, and published the memoir seven years after it.
"Born in France to White Russian emigres who left after 1917"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Moscow (Ancestry)
She married Vladimir Vysotsky in 1970 and moved between Paris and Moscow until his death in 1980, acting as one of the few reliable channels between his work and the West. Her 1987 memoir Vladimir, ou le vol arrete remains a primary source on his last years.
Born in Clichy in 1938, the youngest of four daughters of White Russian emigres; her father was an opera singer, her mother a dancer. All four sisters - Odile Versois, Helene Vallier, Olga Baidar-Poliakoff and Vlady herself - became actresses. She was raised speaking Russian.
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Moscow (Ancestry). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
""Vladimir was Russia for me — its poetry, its madness, its soul.""