Marina Vlady, an actress whose ascent from 1950s sex symbol to leading roles in major French films in the following decades made her one of the most recognizable stars in European cinema, died on Sept. 24 at her home in Ivry-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris. She was 88.
Her death was announced by President Emmanuel Macron of France, who called her “one of the great figures of French cinema,” adding that “she never allowed herself to be shut up in a role, an era or an image.”
As with Brigitte Bardot, Ms. Vlady’s beauty helped her win the attention of directors for dozens of French and Italian films while she was still in her teens, in an era when both actresses, for many film critics, were defined by their physical attributes, including their blond good looks.
While Ms. Bardot’s screen persona was glacial, Ms. Vlady brought a subtle smile and an easy grace to even classically stiff roles, like the one for which she is best remembered in France: the title character in the 1961 costume-drama Princesse de Clèves, adapted from the 17th-century novel of the same name by Madame de La Fayette.
Those qualities later got her a leading part, as Kate Percy, in Orson Welles’s “Falstaff” in 1965 (released as “Chimes at Midnight” in the United States); as a moonlighting part-time prostitute in one of Jean-Luc Godard’s most celebrated, if contested, cinematic experiments, “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” (1967), a film that the critic Renata Adler called “affected and rather tedious”; and in many other films by leading French directors like Bertrand Tavernier and Robert Hossein, to whom she was married for a few years in the 1950s while still a teenager.
“La Princesse de Clèves,” a popular if not critical success in France, was her breakthrough as an actress. Finally, she was allowed to play “a character of great rigor,” she told a television interviewer at the time, “a complete woman, who prefers not to give herself to a man.”
From then on, it was not only her looks that got her the roles, though they helped. “Her Mona Lisa beauty, her onscreen intelligence and her ability to incarnate complex, contradictory characters struck the imagination of several generations of moviegoers,” the critics Bertrand Guyard and Olivier Delcroix wrote in Le Figaro after her death.
In “Two or Three Things I Know About Her,” Mr. Godard gave Ms. Vlady little room to exercise these talents, interrupting the story with whispered ruminations on Paris’s urban transformation, among other topics. He was furiously, if unsuccessfully wooing her at the time, and in the film seemed most concerned with projecting his own worldview. The director barely spoke to her after she turned down his advances.
But when directors allowed her to act, critics noticed. She won best actress award at Cannes in 1963 for her performance in the Italian-French “The Conjugal Bed” (“L’Ape Regina”), which satirized Italian family life and cast her as a sexually insatiable would-be mother paired with a reluctant husband.
“Miss Vlady’s cool, initial primness, her avidity when released by the act of matrimony and her delicate, ladylike hauteur when she has accomplished her sexual and social mission are very tasty, indeed,” the critic Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times.
She charmed reviewers even when the vehicles were duds, as they frequently were in a prolific career of more than 80 films. In “Sophie and the Crime” (1955), also released as “The Girl on the Third Floor,” she played an ingénue trying to exonerate her murderous husband.
“It is with this lovely actress’ characterization that Messrs Gaspard-Huit and Lary have conceived of an irritation abrasive enough to scour the gum off the seats in one hundred movies houses,” the critic Richard W. Nason wrote in The Times, referring to the director Pierre Gaspard-Huit and the screenwriter Pierre Lary. But Ms. Vlady “performs her misbegotten assignment very well,” Mr. Nason wrote.
“I made films I probably shouldn’t have during my career,” Ms. Vlady told a television interviewer for France 3 in 2011. “But I had my children to raise,” she added. She had her first child, Pierre, at 18, with Mr. Hossein.
“I’ve done this career out of a taste for the scripts, the writers,” she said. “But also to make a living.”
Catherine Marina de Poliakoff-Baïdaroff was born on May 10, 1938, in Clichy, a suburb of Paris, the youngest of four daughters of Vladimir de Poliakoff and Militza Envald, Russian émigrés who were often broke, Ms. Vlady recalled in the television interview. In the 1950s, she created the stage name Vlady in homage to her father.
He was an opera singer forced to work as a mason; his wife was a dancer; and all four of their daughters had careers on the stage. She remembered in 2011 that as a child she took part in “a little family concert every Sunday. We needed to earn money. We were poor.”
By the age of 11 she was a “rat” at the Paris Opera, one of the celebrated corps of apprentice dancers at the Opera’s ballet school. That year, 1949, she appeared in her first film, “Orage d’Été” (“Summer Storm”), as an ice skater.
By 1952 she was starring opposite Marcello Mastroianni, who fell for her though she was only 14, in the Italian-made World War II drama “Penne Nere.” In 1954, she had a breakthrough with the French public in “Avant le Deluge” (“Before the Deluge”), a Cold War drama centering on the nuclear threat, winning the prix Suzanne-Bianchetti prize for her performance.
Married at 17 to Mr. Hossein, the director, she went on to make four films with him in the 1950s. They were divorced in 1959; she married Jean-Claude Brouillet, a pilot who had been a French resistance fighter during World War II, in 1963; and, in 1970, she married the celebrated anti-Soviet poet, actor and balladeer Vladimir Vysotsky, with whom she lived in Moscow for a time and who died in 1980, having become a cult hero in Soviet Russia. Her 1987 memoir of their life together, “Vladimir ou le Vol Arrêté” “Vladimir, or the Interrupted Flight” caused a stir among Mr. Vissotsky’s fans in the Soviet Union because it candidly chronicled his drinking and drug use.
Ms. Vlady had always been politically engaged, taking a public stand against France’s Algeria war, briefly joining the French Communist Party, and signing a celebrated declaration in favor of abortion rights, the Manifesto of the 343, in 1971.
She continued an abundant film, theater and television career well into her 70s, published novels, short stories and memoirs, and recorded a number of albums with her sisters.
Ms. Vlady is survived by her sons Pierre and Vladimir.
In later years, Ms. Vlady was under no illusions about the burst of fame and celebrity that had catapulted her to stardom in the 1950s.
“In that era, the producers were real bastards,” she told the newspaper Libération, after her last feature, “Quelques Jours de Répit,” (“A Few Days of Respite”) was released. “Most of them didn’t pay social security tax. The result is that, after a career of about 80 films, my pension is 600 euros a month.”
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