21 Facts About Marina Ladynina

Marina Ladynina was born in Skotinino, Smolensk Governorate, the eldest of four children, and spent her early years in Nazarovo, near Achinsk in Yeniseysk Governorate, Siberia.

Marina Ladynina spent summers as a hired worker at a local farm, milking cows.

Marina Ladynina continued to perform in Achinsk and give musical performances there too, but was now determined to go to Moscow for further education.

Marina Ladynina was instantly in, marked as "remarkably gifted" on the register list, which meant she was free from taking any further exams.

In 1929, Marina Ladynina debuted on screen, in a silent move Do Not Enter This Town.

In 1933 Marina Ladynina played a blind flower girl in Prosperity, directed by Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky.

At the height of the Big Purge many theatres got closed, actors rushed to MAT where Stanislavski has lost his influence and Marina Ladynina was feeling less and less comfortable.

In 1937 Pyryev talked Marina Ladynina into leaving the theatre and took her to Kyiv to shoot The Rich Bride.

Stalin liked it immensely and the happy future of the Pyryev-Marina Ladynina tandem was sealed.

Marina Ladynina has never been the member of the Communist Party and kept her medals in a drawer, avoiding wearing them in public.

The Soviet press lauded Pyryev as "a father of the kolkhoz-based musical comedy," and Marina Ladynina became the first superstar of this peculiar Soviet genre.

Now massively popular, Marina Ladynina started to get weary of the stereotype of a happy and resolute Soviet country girl she was now firmly associated with.

Marina Ladynina grabbed the opportunity, but all of her episodes turned out to be cut out by censors who loathed, apparently, the way her heroine sympathized with Taras instead of "hating him, as class enemy".

Marina Ladynina divorced 58-year-old Pyryev and found herself in isolation: some directors received prompt orders from her ex-husband to ignore her, for others she was too much of a symbol of the Stalin's era.

Marina Ladynina joined the Cinema Actors Theatre but later was asked to leave so as to give way to more 'active' actresses.

Marina Ladynina tried to make it as a singer, having taken lessons from the well known tutor Dora Belyavskaya, but nothing came out of it.

Marina Ladynina died of heart attack, on March 10,2003.

Maria Marina Ladynina married her first husband, actor Ivan Lyubeznov, in 1935.

Maria Marina Ladynina's career was short and her artistic credo limited.

Unlike Lyubov Orlova, Marina Ladynina was a folklore-type actress to fit perfectly into the Pyryev-discovered genre of Soviet countryside musical comedy.

Marina Ladynina who loved stage, spent the last half a century of her life out of it, waiting for this telephone call which never came.