Marina Vlady

The Russian roots of a child of war

Marina Vlady was never meant to be a supporting player. The daughter of Russian immigrants in France, she started working in film at age ten, because at home art was a pure matter of survival. Her three sisters were also actresses, but she had that icy stare that directors of the fifties looked for in their European dramas.

In 1949, she made her debut in Orage d’été.

Her career truly took off when she moved away from the ingenue image. In 1956, she starred in La sorcière, and half of Europe became obsessed with her physical presence on screen. It wasn't just beauty: Vlady projected a maturity that didn't match her actual age. Offers began arriving from Italy and France at the same time.

In 1963 she won the Best Actress award at Cannes for her role in Una storia moderna: l'ape regina. Marco Ferreri directed her in this fierce satire about marriage and desire. The jury unanimously decided the award after seeing her ability to carry the weight of such a dark comedy.

The Price of Godard's Gaze

Jean-Luc Godard wanted her for À bout de souffle, but she said no. It was a risky decision that few understood in the effervescent Paris of the French New Wave. Still, they ended up working together in 1967 on 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle.

It was the coldest shoot of her life.

Godard fed her lines through an earpiece during takes. Vlady earned a considerable salary for that work, which is now studied in film schools around the world. The result was a stripped-down film in which she looked straight into the camera with a honesty that made viewers uncomfortable.

And the gamble paid off.

But auteur cinema was not her only refuge. She worked with Orson Welles on Campanadas a medianoche in 1965 and adapted to the chaotic rhythm of the American director. Vlady saw filmmaking as a technical craft rather than a religious mystique. So she jumped from big productions to experimental projects without batting an eye.

The Soviet Connection and Emotional Exile

Her life changed when she traveled to Moscow in 1967. There she met Vladimir Vysotsky, the most famous bard in the Soviet Union and a poet cursed by the regime. They married in 1970, and for a decade she lived between two opposing worlds. She was the Western star who brought jeans and banned records into the USSR.

Vysotsky died in 1980 of heart failure.

Vlady wrote Vladimir ou le Vol arrêté in 1987 to tell that self-destructive love story. The book sold millions of copies and was translated into numerous languages. But the film industry gradually forgot her while she took refuge in theater and literature almost obsessively, because writing allowed her to control the story of her own life.

In 2011 she appeared in Quelques jours de répit, playing a woman who helps two Iranian gay men. It was a small production shot on a tight budget around Annecy. In 2018 she took part in the documentary C'était écrit, about the history of French cinema. The actress lives in an apartment in Paris after selling her country house in 2015 to simplify her pace of life.