Marina Vlady, the French actress whose films won her a massive Soviet following before her marriage to renowned poet and singer Vladimir Vysotsky, has died aged 88. Her family told AFP that she died at home on 24 September, surrounded by loved ones.
Born in France in 1938 to Russian émigré parents, Vlady began acting as a child and appeared in more than 80 films. Her cinematic career took her through popular European cinema and the experimental work of leading directors.
Vlady won the Best Actress award at Cannes in 1963 for Marco Ferreri’s The Conjugal Bed. She later appeared in Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1965) and starred in Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967).
The film that won Soviet hearts
Soviet viewers had met Vlady in a French-Swedish film based on Russian literature.
La Sorcière (1956), also known as The Witch or The Blond Witch, casts Vlady as a young woman living in a remote Swedish forest. Director André Michel transplanted a story by Russian writer Aleksandr Kuprin to Scandinavia, where a visiting engineer becomes fascinated by her.
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The role helped make Vlady an international star. In its 2021 retrospective, Berlin’s Arsenal film institute described the film, known in Russian as Koldunya, as retaining cult status in Russia.
A study of Soviet Screen magazine from 1957 to 1968 identified Vlady as a particular favourite following the film’s success in the Soviet Union. Researchers linked her warm reception to her Russian origins, political sympathies and a performance that audiences recognised as faithful to Kuprin’s heroine.
Her appeal preceded a relationship that would later become central to accounts of her life in the Soviet Union.
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Her romance with Vladimir Vysotsky
Vlady first met Vladimir Vysotsky, the famous singer and guitar poet, in Moscow in 1967. She later married Vysotsky, who was widely known in the West as the ‘Russian Bob Dylan.’
Their marriage, in which the pair was back and forth between Paris and Moscow, lasted until his tragic death in 1980, commonly blamed on drug addiction. Vlady recalled their relationship in her 1987 memoir, Vladimir ou le vol arrêté (‘Vladimir: The Aborted Flight’) which was later adapted for the stage.
Despite both being actors, Vlady’s and Vysotsky’s bond produced only one intimate piece of cinema, according to Arsenal film institute. In Márta Mészáros’s The Two of Them (1977), they walk along a snowy street and exchange a farewell kiss — a brief screen record of their life together.
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