Early life Marina Ladynina was born in ,
Smolensk Governorate, the eldest of four children, and spent her early years in Nazarovo, near
Achinsk in
Yeniseysk Governorate,
Siberia. Her parents, Aleksey Dmitriyevich Ladynin (1879-1955) and Maria Naumovna (1889-1971) were uneducated peasants; the family lived in a small wooden hut and young Marina had to do most of the hard work in the house. She spent summers as a hired worker at a local farm, milking cows. In 1934 the directors Ivan Pravov and
Olga Preobrazhenskaya gave Ladynina the part of the teacher Linka in ''Enemy's Paths
(Vrazhji tropy). It was there that she met both actor Ivan Lyubeznov, whom she soon married, and director Ivan Pyryev. Another film she starred in, The Post at the Devil's Ford'' (directed by Miron Bilinsky in 1936) was pronounced 'ideologically wrong' and shelved. but the audiences loved the romantic story of a Russian country girl from
Vologda (Ladynina) and Musaib, a shepherd from the
Caucasus, played by
Vladimir Zeldin. This paean to the friendship of Soviet nations became highly relevant and extremely popular at the frontlines where people of different ethnic groups fought against the Nazis side by side. Konstantin Yudin's comedy
Antosha Rybkin and Pyryev's heroic drama
The Raikom Secretary (both 1942) went almost unnoticed, but lyrical melodrama
Six P.M. (1944) with Ladynina as Varya Pankova, a Moscow kindergarten teacher, proved immensely popular. Another hit,
Ballad of Siberia (1947) ended up 3rd in the 1948 box-office rating. This musical comedy with Ladynina as singer Natasha Malinina pretended to raise serious ethical and moral questions but
Sergei Eisenstein, for one, dismissed it as "Russian lubok imported from Czechoslovakia" (that was where the film had been shot). {{external media
Cossacks of the Kuban (1949) saw Ladynina for the first time playing a mature woman, not some starry-eyed, naïve ingénue. The role of the Kolkhoz chairman Galina Peresvetova, a woman of tough character and tender heart, proved to be so difficult to handle that the actress for a time being was on the verge of quitting. Some argued that when it came to verve and charms, young
Klara Luchko stole the show, but it was this hit that earned Ladynina the prestigious
People's Artist of the USSR title. Ladynina, well aware that this 'masterpiece of
Socialist realism' had nothing to do with the Soviet reality, still loved it. In one of her last interviews she claimed: "Even today I continue to receive letters from people expressing their gratitude, they are still under the spell of those comedy luboks… which, I am convinced, had every right to deviate as far from the cruel reality towards fairytale as one would wish them to. We really believed that we 'were born to turn a fairytale into the real thing' and we tried our best." Now massively popular, Ladynina started to get weary of the stereotype of a happy and resolute Soviet country girl she was now firmly associated with. Not a single director even thought of inviting her to play anything different: she was considered "a Pyryev actress". The one exception was Igor Savchenko who invited Ladynina to play a countess in
Taras Shevtchenko (1951). She 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".
Oblivion and death In 1954 the official directive came out forbidding Soviet film directors to cast their own wives. The part of Olga Kalmykova in Pyryev's
Proof of Loyalty (1954) proved to be Ladynina's last. She divorced 58-year-old Pyryev (who fell in love with young actress
Lyudmila Marchenko) 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. Not a single theatre wanted to have a recent superstar in their troupe. She joined the Cinema Actors Theatre but later was asked to leave so as to give way to more 'active' actresses. Ladynina tried to make it as a singer, having taken lessons from the well known tutor Dora Belyavskaya, but nothing came out of it. In 1965
Nikita Mikhalkov invited her to play a part in his
Lermontov movie project which was never realised. In her later years Ladynina rarely gave interviews and refused to talk about her life with Ivan Pyryev. In 1998 she received the
Nika Award ("For Honesty and Dignity") and was greeted with standing ovation. Ladynina's one and only televised interview came out not long before her 95th birthday. Marina Ladynina died of heart attack, on March 10, 2003. She is interred in
Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. ==Private life==