Lyubov Orlova was born to a family of
Russian hereditary nobles on her maternal side and
gentry on her paternal side in
Zvenigorod, 60 km from Moscow, then lived with her parents and older sister in
Yaroslavl. Her acting and singing talents were evident very early on, but her noble parents considered acting a disgraceful career and directed her towards classical music. There she began to study music. In 1914, after her father left for the front, her mother Evgenia Nikolaevna and her daughters settled in Moscow, where the sisters entered the gymnasium. The Orlovs spent the difficult years of the
Civil War in
Voskresensk because their mother's sister lived here. The family subsisted on funds from the sale of milk which was given by the aunt's cow. Lyuba and Nonna drove nearly a hundred kilometers to Moscow, and then went home, with heavy cans. Hence comes the legend of the ugly hands which Orlova was so shy about. Her first and last names are meaningful words in Russian: любовь means "love", and Орлова is the feminine form of орлов "eagle's". When she was seven,
Fyodor Shalyapin predicted her future as a famous actress. In 1919–1922, she studied as a piano student at the
Moscow Conservatory under
Karl Kipp but did not graduate because she had to work as a music teacher and a pianist-illustrator of
silent films in movie theaters () to support her parents. In 1925, she has graduated from the
Moscow Theatre College, choreography department. Her first husband, a Soviet economist,
Andrei Berzin, was arrested in 1930. However, this did not affect her career. Dmitri Shcheglov, a biography author, wrote in
Love and Mask ('Lyubov i maska', 1997): "As an eternal irony and foresight of fate, the best performer of the roles of house servants and enthusiasts of Communist labor was a descendant of ten Russian Orthodox saints. Two of them,
Olga, the Grand Princess of Kiev, and
Vladimir, the Grand Prince of Kiev, are among the
Equal-to-apostles... Red Eagle in an azure-golden field, the
House of Orlov's coat of arms, is also present on the
Bezhetsk clan branch the actress belonged to..." The Orlov family was partly saved from the worst form of repression,
camps or
deportation, and the Bolshevik "redistribution of property" only because even before
the Revolution, her father Peter had lost all three of his estates at cards, and therefore there was practically nothing to take away. However, Orlova's father, an engineer and
class enemy, was officially banned as an employee. In September 1926, she was hired as a choir singer by the
Nemirovich-Danchenko Theatre Music Studio finally deciding to become an actress, not a pianist. In 1932, she received her first leading roles in
La Périchole and
Les cloches de Corneville. Despite her success with the public, vocal and acting training in a theatre with , Orlova wasn't noticed by the press and was criticized by her colleagues for not having a real singing voice (
Faina Ranevskaya, her close friend, used to say "Orlova is a gorgeous actress for sure. But her voice! When she sings it sounds like somebody is urinating in an empty bucket.") However, Orlova had her "trick". Remembering her student years (and she studied at the choreography department of the Moscow Theater College named after A.V. Lunacharsky, now -
GITIS), she decided to bring herself back to her previous form and perform Serpoletta's entrance aria on pointe. Alexander Hort, writer, wrote: "The audience was smitten: while dancing, Serpoletta stood up on pointe shoes, so graceful, airy, romantic! And Orlova made a tactically verified move, she took the bull by the horns: the very first vocal number, Serpoletta's verses 'What a pity that an unsettling case pushed me to a different path!' she performed, dancing on her fingers." In the future, no one was able to repeat this trick, it has stayed as a semi-legendary fact of history. In 1933, she met the then-unknown director
Grigory Alexandrov, who was looking for actors for his film
Jolly Fellows (1934). The two began a relationship and later married. Orlova's performance in this comedy, very popular in the USSR, earned the young star the sympathy of
Stalin and the title "Honorable actor of the
RSFSR". It had caused the first wave of the so-called "Orlova syndrome", a Soviet psychiatric term describing women who wanted to be like Orlova. They diligently lightened their hair and self-styled themselves as relatives to the idol. According to her relatives, Orlova secretly loathed
Joseph Stalin, reacting to the
war-winning dictator's death with the words: "Finally, this scum is dead". Her critics, including
Sergei Eisenstein, had blamed the musician-turned-actress for ruining the serious career of Alexandrov. Despite her efforts, Orlova didn't have a reputation of a serious drama actress, moreover, she was intentionally overplaying her film roles and didn't stop her constant touring as a singer. Her haters credited her success to the marriage of convenience and Stalin protection In the next few years she starred in four popular movies which also became instant Soviet classics:
Circus (1936),
Volga-Volga (1938),
Tanya (1940), and
Springtime (1947). She was awarded the
Stalin Prize in 1941. In 1950, she became the first woman to receive the title of the
People's Artist of the USSR exclusively for her cinematic works. After that, she switched to playing in theatre productions of
Yuri Zavadsky's company. Her most famous roles included
Nora - Nora,
Dear Liar - Patrick Campbell,
Strange Mrs. Savage - Mrs. Ethel Savage. But her most acclaimed performance was a title role in
Lizzie MacKay (Russian title for
The Respectful Prostitute).
Jean-Paul Sartre was present on a jubilee 400th show in 1962, saying: "I was especially impressed by Lyubov Orlova's talented performance. After the show, I told her I've been delighted by her performance. It was not an empty compliment. Lyubov Orlova is really the best of all LizzieMacKay performers I know." Since the 1928 till her death, she was constantly touring as a singer with her pianist Leo Mironov (). Her early repertoire included classical songs by
Glinka,
Mussorgsky,
Dargomyzhsky and
Tchaikovsky. During
the war, she toured more than 50,000 kilometers along the front line, with her concerts based on
Isaak Dunayevsky songs from her movies. For all of her career, she was banned from making the records of her songs and performing on television, supposedly because of her "backstage war" with
Klavdiya Shulzhenko,
Leonid Utesov's choice of interest for
Jolly Fellows.
Ivan Kozlovsky especially regretted the absence of recordings of his own duets with Orlova. == Awards and honours ==