Marina Vlady

Marina Vlady was a French actress, singer and writer of White Russian descent whose screen career ran from child roles in the late 1940s into the 2010s, and who won Best Actress at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival for Marco Ferreri's The Conjugal Bed (Le Lit conjugal / Una storia moderna: l'ape regina). She died on 24 September 2026 at the age of 88. Her children told AFP that she died at home, surrounded by her loved ones and her animals, and they remembered "une longue et belle vie bien remplie" (a long and beautiful life well lived). Le Monde, Paris Match, TF1 Info, L'Avenir and international wires reported the news the same day.

She was born Catherine Marina de Poliakoff-Baidaroff on 10 May 1938 in Clichy, then in the Seine department and now in Hauts-de-Seine, to White Russian immigrant parents. Her father, Vladimir de Poliakoff, was an opera singer who had arrived in France in 1915 and served in the First World War; her mother, Militza Envald, was a dancer of Russian and Swedish origin who reached France after the Russian Revolution. The family struggled financially; Vladimir worked for a time as a factory labourer in Clichy. Marina and her three older sisters (Olga Varen, Odile Versois and Helene Vallier) became known as the Poliakoff sisters. Paris Match later noted that the shared initial V in their stage names stood for "Victoire". Marina trained as a petit rat at the Paris Opera ballet school while continuing adapted secondary studies, and in 1949 La Vie catholique illustree asked on its cover whether this young ballet pupil would become a star.

She made her film debut that same year as Marie-Tempete in Jean Gehret's Summer Storm (Orage d'ete) and worked steadily in French and Italian cinema through the 1950s. Andre Cayatte's Before the Deluge (Avant le deluge, 1954) brought the Prix Suzanne Bianchetti for a promising young actress. Under Robert Hossein, whom she married in 1955 at seventeen, she appeared in The Wicked Go to Hell, Forgive Us Our Trespasses, Toi, le venin and La Nuit des espions. Jean Delannoy's La Princesse de Cleves (1961) confirmed her as a leading lady able to carry a prestige literary adaptation. International recognition followed with Ferreri's The Conjugal Bed (1963), Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight (1965) as Kate Percy, jury service at the 4th Moscow International Film Festival the same year, and Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967). Across roughly a hundred films she moved between popular comedy (Jean Yanne, Jean-Marie Poire) and auteur cinema (Bertrand Tavernier, Ettore Scola, Marta Meszaros, Fernando Solanas), returning to leading roles as late as Amor Hakkar's A Few Days of Respite (2010).

She also sang. With her sisters as Les Soeurs Poliakoff she recorded chanson EPs that won a Grand Prix du Disque Charles-Cros; alone she released Russian lullabies and records linked to Vladimir Vysotsky. She published about thirteen books, among them the memoir Vladimir, or the Aborted Flight (Vladimir ou le Vol arrete, 1987) and her cinema memoirs 24 images/seconde (2005). On stage she returned repeatedly to Chekhov and to a recital drawn from her Vysotsky book at the Theatre des Bouffes-du-Nord.

Her private life tracked European cultural and political currents. She married actor-director Robert Hossein (1955-1959), with whom she had sons Pierre and Igor; then aviator and Resistance veteran Jean-Claude Brouillet (1963-1966), with whom she had son Vladimir; then the Soviet bard Vladimir Vysotsky (married 1970 until his death in 1980). Their long-distance Paris-Moscow life inspired songs and her writing; she joined the French Communist Party in 1968, which eased travel to the USSR. From about 1981 until his death in 2003 she lived with oncologist Leon Schwartzenberg; her sons later recalled that together they fought for housing rights and helped create the DAL (Droit au logement) movement. In 1971 she signed the Manifesto of the 343 for abortion rights when the procedure was still illegal in France. She had earlier sheltered FLN support network figure Francis Jeanson during the Algerian War and joined protests against the OAS; later she protested deportations of Arab workers and, in 2015, signed the Appel des 58 defending the right to demonstrate under the state of emergency.

Colleagues and audiences remembered an actress who bridged French and Russian cultures, New Wave and popular film, and who used her public voice for causes she believed in. She received the Medal of Pushkin and was named Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1994). She is survived by her three sons.