Marina Vlady

This provocative sex kitten had the obvious makings of a superstar blonde bombshell and could have ended up in film history annals as merely a second-rate Brigitte Bardot, but Marina Vlady rose above her sex symbol status and proved she was capable of so much more. In her prime she was nominated for a Golden Globe and won a "Best Actress" award at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival for her stunning performance in The Conjugal Bed (1963) with Italy's Ugo Tognazzi. She was born Marina De Poliakoff-Baïdaroff, in Clichy, France on May 10, 1938, the youngest of four acting sisters. Her Russian-born father was a well-established painter in France. While young Marina trained in dance and initially seemed to entertain thoughts of becoming a prima ballerina, she discovered, as did her sisters, a closer kinship to acting. The most outgoing of her siblings, Monica caught the eye of talent agents via more uninhibited roles. Older sister Odile Versois, who possessed a similar feline beauty, was the first of her family to enter pictures. Marina (playing a youthful roller-skater) and another sister Olga Baïdar-Poliakoff made their minor film debuts in Summer Storm (1949) [Summer Storm], which featured Odile. The remaining sister Hélène Vallier was featured in Marina's highly-praised film Black Feathers (1952) (Black Feathers). In 1955, at the ripe young age of 17, Marina met and married director/writer/actor Robert Hossein, who featured her prominently and seductively in a number of his films including The Wicked Go to Hell (1955), as a femme fatale bent on revenge, Pardonnez nos offenses (1956), Double Agents (1959) and, notably, Blonde in a White Car (1958) [aka Nude in a White Car], which co-starred sister Odile. She had two sons by Hossein but the marriage lasted only a few years. Gracing both French and Italian productions throughout most of her career, Marina was not shy at playing unsympathetic, even caustic characters, and proved adept at both saucy comedy and edgy drama, appearing for such notable directors as Jean-Luc Godard and Christian-Jaque. Playing opposite some of Europe's finest leading men, she was a vision in loveliness alongside Marcello Mastroianni in Black Feathers (1952), a touching WWII drama, she also co-starred with Italy's top character actor Aldo Fabrizi in Too Young for Love (1953). One of her rare English-speaking appearances came with the Orson Welles historical drama Chimes at Midnight (1965). Marina became a strong social and political activist, notably for women's reproductive rights, into the 1970s. She continued strongly in films with Sappho (1971), Everybody He Is Nice, Everybody He Is Beautiful (1972), Let Joy Reign Supreme (1975), the Hungarian film Women (1977), The Bermuda Triangle (1978) and His Master's Eye (1980). As she moved Into the 1980's, the actress turned more and more towards TV work. Married three times, Vlady was the widow of heralded Russian poet/songwriter/actor Vladimir Vysotskiy, her last husband, who allegedly died of heart failure in 1980 at the age 42 after years of alcohol and drug abuse. Later films would include Bordello (1985), in which she played a French madam; a smaller role as the wife of hotel manager Philippe Noiret in the comedy Twist Again in Moscow (1986); leads in both the Greek drama Wind Over the City (1996) and the gay-themed French film A Few Days of Respite (2010). She also had a recurring role in the French TV dramedy series Sam (2016). In her later years, Marina and longtime companion, Léon Schwartzenberg, a leading French-Jewish cancer specialist widely known as a radical political activist, became involved in a number of social injustices. He passed away in 2003. As a writer, she published a book on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and continued performing on stage, including a political one-woman show on one of her books about husband Vysotsky. Marina outlived all her her elder sisters. Odile died in 1980, Helene in 1988 and Olga in 2009.