Marina Vlady

Catherine Marina de Poliakoff-Baïdaroff was born in Clichy on 10 May 1938, to White Russian immigrant parents. Her father, Vladimir Poliakoff, was an opera singer, and her mother, Militza, was a dancer. Her sisters, now all deceased, were the actresses Odile Versois, Hélène Vallier and Olga Baïdar-Poliakoff. The sisters began acting as children and, for a while, pursued a ballet career.

Vlady won the Best Actress Award at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival for The Conjugal Bed. In 1965, she was a member of the jury at the 4th Moscow International Film Festival.

She starred in Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), and later portrayed the insightful and protective stepmother in the Italian film The Flavor of Corn (1986). A rare English language role was as Kate Percy in Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight (1966).

Her television credits include the 1983 mini-series La Chambre des Dames.

In 1971, Vlady signed the Manifesto of the 343, which publicly declared she had an abortion as a way to advocate for abortion, even though the procedure was illegal in France at the time.

Vlady and her partner Léon Schwartzenberg participated in the protests against deportations of Arab workers from France. She accepted a role in a film about a gay couple from Iran.

From 1955 to 1959, Vlady was married to actor/director Robert Hossein. From 1963 to 1966, she was married to Jean-Claude Brouillet, a French entrepreneur, owner of two airlines and member of the French Resistance.

Vlady's third husband was the Soviet poet and songwriter, Vladimir Vysotsky; they were married and lived in Moscow from 1969 until his death in 1980. Vlady wrote Vladimir, or the Aborted Flight, a memoir of her relationship with Vladimir Vysotsky. For a decade, the couple maintained a long-distance relationship as Vlady compromised her career in France in order to spend more time in Moscow, and his friends pulled strings for him to travel abroad. She eventually joined the Communist Party of France, which essentially gave her an unlimited-entry visa into the Soviet Union, and provided Vysotsky with some immunity against prosecution by the government. The problems of his long-distance relationship with Vlady inspired several of Vysotsky's songs.

She also lived with French oncologist Léon Schwartzenberg from 1980 until his death in 2003.

Vlady died on 24 September 2026, aged 88. According to a statement by her children, she died "at home, surrounded by her loved ones and her animals".