Nadezhda Rumyantseva

Nadezhda Vasilevna Rumyantseva (sometimes spelled Rumiantseva) was a sort of Russian combination of Gidget + Tammy + Lucille Ball. Rumyantseva first acted on the stage, at Moscow's Central Children's Theater, when she was a teenager in the 1940s. She made her film debut at 22 in "Encountering Life." Her years of great popularity in the USSR came in the late 1950s to the mid-60s, when she starred in a series of teen-age family comedies, "The Unamenables" ('59), "Gals" ('61), "Queen of the Gas Station" ('63), etc., in a couple of which her romantic-comic partner was played by Yuri Belov. After she married a trade representative from the Georgian (Caucasus Mts.) Republic, she retired from acting in Russia for several years, in order to live with her husband abroad. In her comeback as a Russian actress in recent decades, she had to "act her age," no longer the once-beloved cute little teenager, and occasionally she has dubbed voices for animated cartoons.