Ekaterina Raikina

Ekaterina Arkadyevna Raikina was born on 15 April 1938 in Leningrad, in the family of the actor and satirist Arkady Isaakovich Raikin (1911 to 1987) and the actress Ruth Markovna Raikina-Ioffe (1915 to 1989). Her younger brother, Konstantin Raikin, born in 1950, became a leading Russian actor and theatre director and a People's Artist of Russia.

She first stepped onto a professional stage as a child of 12, playing Cosette in the Vakhtangov Theatre's staging of Les Miserables.

Raikina studied at the Boris Shchukin Theatre School in Moscow, the training school attached to the Vakhtangov Theatre, and graduated in 1959.

On graduating in 1959 Raikina joined the company of the Vakhtangov Theatre, where she remained for around 50 years. Her roles there included Sofya in Ladies and Hussars, Zelima in Princess Turandot, Lucile in The Bourgeois Gentleman, Ira in Antony and Cleopatra, Maya in Irkutsk Story, Katya and Pasha in The Idiot and Polly in The Millionairess, as well as parts in Cinderella, The Twelfth Hour and The White Rabbit. She also performed at the Moscow theatre U Nikitskikh Vorot.

In 1976 she was given the title Honoured Artist of the RSFSR.

Raikina appeared on screen much less often than on stage. Her film and television work included Zapadnya (1962), Honeymoon (1962), My White City (1962), Youth of Our Fathers (1962), Short Stories (1963), Two Hours Earlier (1967), Sofya Perovskaya (1967), in which she played Gesya Gelfman, the television version of Ladies and Hussars (1976), Puss in Boots (1979), in which she played the princess, The Pious Martha (1980), as Dona Ines, and Women's Club (1987). She also read the narration for the 1962 animated film The Bathhouse and took part in a 1961 radio production of Pere Goriot.

Raikina was married three times. Her first husband, from 1958 to 1960, was the actor Mikhail Derzhavin. Her second husband, from 1961 to 1964, was the actor Yuri Yakovlev, later a People's Artist of the USSR; their son, Alexei Yakovlev, was born in 1961 and worked as an actor before moving into business. Her third husband was the Vakhtangov Theatre actor Vladimir Koval, who died in 2013.

Ekaterina Raikina died in Moscow on Tuesday 3 November 2026, aged 88. Her son, Alexei Yakovlev, announced her death, and a source quoted by TASS confirmed it, saying she had died of natural causes and remained conscious until the end. An official cause of death was not published.

She had been taken to hospital urgently in early October 2026 with suspected acute intestinal bleeding and spent her last weeks there. Reports said she was largely confined to bed during that time, and doctors had for a while managed to stabilise her condition.

Raikina is remembered as a long serving member of the Vakhtangov company whose career spanned half a century of the theatre's repertoire, from Princess Turandot to Shakespeare and Moliere. As the daughter of Arkady Raikin and the sister of Konstantin Raikin, she was also part of a theatrical dynasty that shaped Soviet and Russian comedy and drama across three generations.