French actress Marina Vlady, who was married to Soviet actor and poet Vladimir Vysotsky, has died at the age of 88.
BFM TV reported the death, citing a representative of her family, who did not disclose the cause.
Vlady, whose real name was Ekaterina-Marina Polyakoff-Baidaroff, was born on May 10, 1938, in Clichy, France, to Russian émigré parents. Her father was an opera singer and her mother a ballerina.
She began acting as a child and gained international recognition for her leading role in The Witch (1956), based on Alexander Kuprin’s novella Olesya.
In 1963, Vlady won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for Marco Ferreri’s The Conjugal Bed. She also worked with directors including Jean-Luc Godard and Orson Welles, appearing in more than 100 films throughout her career.
In the Soviet Union and Russia, Vlady was particularly well known as the wife of Vysotsky. The couple met in 1967 and married in 1970. Their marriage lasted until Vysotsky’s death in 1980.
Following his death, Vlady wrote a memoir about their relationship, Vladimir, or Interrupted Flight.
