In Strasbourg, in 2009, Marina Vlady presents ‘Le Fol Enfant,’ a story devoted to her son. The actress and writer extends her family memory work here. Credits: Ji-Elle / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported (also available under CC BY-SA 2.5, 2.0, 1.0 and GFDL 1.2 or later).
“‘Injustice is what keeps me going,’ Marina Vlady explained in 2014.” She was then returning to the stage in Le Cavalier seul, by Jacques Audiberti. As a guest on France 2, the actress spoke as much about her craft as about her causes. The play, which examines the excesses of religion, gave her another chance to bring the two together.
The actress, writer, and singer died on Thursday, September 24, 2026, at the age of 88, her family announced to AFP. Her children said she passed away “at home, surrounded by her loved ones and her animals”. The cause of death was not disclosed. The family announcement does not specify the location of her home or the arrangements for the funeral.
Revisiting Marina Vlady’s films today makes it possible to measure the breadth of her roles. Her career ranges from The Princess of Cleves to Two or Three Things I Know About Her. Her path connects several artistic practices. It begins with a childhood steeped in Russian culture, then a career between France and Italy. It continues through books and performances in which she speaks in her own name. Her feminist and social commitments accompanied this journey.
A Russian Childhood, A European Career
Born on May 10, 1938, in Clichy, Catherine Marina de Poliakoff-Baïdaroff grew up in a family where art was part of daily life. Her mother had been a dancer, her father an opera singer before becoming a laborer. Marina Vlady and her three sisters, Olga Poliakoff, Odile Versois, and Hélène Vallier, all went into show business. Dance, singing, and acting were part of their training.
In 2015, Marina Vlady looked back on this upbringing during a meeting with the press in Niort. La Nouvelle République reports her line: “Art was our religion.” She also recalled that her father had arrived in France in 1915 to enlist in the French army. That detail sets her story apart from one of immigration solely resulting from the Russian Revolution of 1917. The family passed on a shared culture, but her parents each had their own path.
Marina Vlady worked from childhood and began filming very young. Before the Deluge, by André Cayatte, earned her the Suzanne-Bianchetti Prize in 1954, which honors a promising young actress. Her career then developed between French and Italian cinema. With Robert Hossein, she notably filmed The Damned Go to Hell.
The stage extended the family connection. At the Théâtre Hébertot, she performed in Three Sisters, by Chekhov, with Odile Versois and Hélène Vallier. The link between the characters and the performers takes on a concrete dimension here: three actress sisters bring a Russian repertory text to life together. They also recorded songs under the name the Poliakoff Sisters. This collective practice crossed several disciplines, far beyond Marina’s film career alone.
Three Roles That Shifted Her Image
With Jean Delannoy’s The Princess of Cleves in 1961, Marina Vlady landed a role that called for a different way of acting. In an interview preserved by INA, she emphasizes the character’s discipline, and the changes it imposed in diction and bearing. She also gauges the professional stakes of this adaptation of Madame de La Fayette, after a career that began in childhood.
The young woman caught between desire and duty gave her a character whose inner conflict drives the story. The archive above all shows an actress aware of the work required. She speaks about the importance of the role, what she has to defend on screen, and the recognition she expects from it. Behind the lasting image of the princess lies this professional ambition.
Two years later, Marco Ferreri’s The Conjugal Bed took her into a very different world. The film, titled L’Ape regina in Italian, begins with the marriage of a bourgeois man in his forties. He marries a young woman who matches his social circle’s expectations: piety, respectability, and a maternal calling. Marital conventions become the raw material for a satire. Marina Vlady plays Regina opposite Ugo Tognazzi.
The Cannes Film Festival awarded her the Best Actress prize in 1963. The honor recognized her performance in this film. It placed her career within Italian cinema capable of examining social norms through situations involving couples and families.
In Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her in 1967, the setting shifts again. She plays Juliette, a woman living in a large housing development in the Paris region who occasionally prostitutes herself. Godard uses her daily life as an entry point into urban change, consumer relations, and the contradictions of consumer society.
From Delannoy to Ferreri and then Godard, female characters move through very different stories. Literary adaptation, marital satire, and an exploration of the present make up this range. These films show the breadth of her career without reducing it to a string of famous co-stars. Her filmography also includes Orson Welles’s Falstaff. It extends to Jean Yanne’s popular comedy Tout le monde il est beau, tout le monde il est gentil. She moved among these genres over the course of a career spanning more than 80 films, according to AFP.
Writing And Long-Term Commitment
Starting in the 1990s, theater and writing took on a larger role. In 1987, Marina Vlady published Vladimir, or The Interrupted Flight with Fayard. The book is devoted to the poet and singer Vladimir Vysotsky, her husband, who died in 1980. It was later adapted for the stage. The relationship thus became an act of transmission, carried successively by the written narrative and the actress’s voice.
Her memoirs, 24 Frames per Second, came out in 2005. With about ten books, she built a body of work as an author alongside her acting roles. Cinema memories, family ties, and bereavements occupy an important place there. Le Fol Enfant, published in 2009, notably returns to one of her sons’ accident. Loved ones then cease to be only figures in her public biography: they become subjects of her own stories.
Her attachment to Russian culture remained, with an explicit distance from political power. During her interview on France Inter in May 2022, she condemned the invasion of Ukraine and evoked Vysotsky’s anti-war poems. This statement clarifies the distinction she draws between a culture, its works, and the decisions of a regime.
Her feminist commitment dates back notably to her signing of the 343 Manifesto in 1971, in support of abortion rights. Alongside oncologist Léon Schwartzenberg, she then became involved in support for people with inadequate housing and undocumented migrants. In her 2015 interview in Niort, she said she had taken part in founding Droit au logement. She described her presence at the organization’s rallies.
In October 2015, DAL announced her visit with Pierre Richard to families who had been evicted or threatened with eviction, at the sites of their mobilization. As the winter eviction moratorium approached, the association called for the suspension of evictions and discussions about rehousing the families. Marina Vlady lent her name to these demands, as part of a commitment she pursued after Léon Schwartzenberg’s death in 2003.
After her death, her sons reminded AFP of her commitments, from the Algerian War to the right to housing. On France Inter in May 2022, she was still expressing that determination. “We have to say things and keep shouting even if they gag us.”