Married to television: how was the fate of the host of "Good night, kids!" Valentina Leontyeva

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

May 20 - Memorial Day of the People's Artist of the USSR, TV announcer, host of Good Night, Kids!, "Visiting a fairy tale", "With all my heart" Valentina Leontyeva … In 2007 she passed away. Charming aunt Valya was adored by little viewers and their parents, Bulat Okudzhava and Arkady Raikin were in love with her, she was twice married, but she called television her greatest love. She had to sacrifice a lot of this love.

Valentina Leontyeva was born on August 1, 1923 in Leningrad. During the Second World War, the family had a chance to survive the blockade and famine, which she could not forget until the end of her days. They cooked jelly from carpentry glue and soup from a leather belt cut into small pieces. To distract her daughters from thinking about food and discourage their appetite, their mother taught them to smoke. Valentina has been an inveterate smoker all her life and gave up this habit only a year before her death.

Valentina dreamed of becoming an actress and in the post-war period she graduated from the opera and drama studio. Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theater, worked at the Tambov Drama Theater, and then came to television. She first appeared on the screen in 1954. Her debut as an announcer was unsuccessful: she needed to read a message on a Christmas tree in the Central House of the Soviet Army, and she was so agitated that she began to stutter. But that was the only mistake. 10 years later, without her participation, not a single holiday program on central television took place.

There were many romantic stories in her life. Once in 1945, immediately after the Victory, Valentina saw a captured German who was digging a trench, and he asked her for bread. She obtained permission to feed him lunch, and 10 years later he returned to the USSR to thank her and propose to her. She refused him, as well as another boyfriend - an Arbat boy who sang songs to her and dedicated poetry. It was Bulat Okudzhava. They met 40 years later, when Leontyev was asked to invite the poet to a TV show. And a month after this meeting, Bulat Okudzhava died. Valentina said: “I am terribly sorry now that we have lost these forty years without seeing each other - how many things could have been different!”.

The first time she got married was in her student years. This marriage was short-lived and broke up due to her husband's infidelity. For the second time, Valentina married diplomat Yuri Vinogradov, whom she fell in love with at first sight. They lived together for 28 years, but then broke up. Two years after the birth of their son, Valentina became the host of the program "Good night, kids!" Her son was very jealous of her for all the children to whom she paid more attention than him, and worried that his mother was “everyone”, and not just him.

Leontyeva devoted 50 years of her life to television and called it her greatest love. She confessed: “Television was my number one home. She left for work - my son was still asleep. I came back - I was already asleep. I didn’t swaddle, and I didn’t even feed”. Perhaps this was the reason for their discord in the future. The son rarely spoke to his mother, and in recent years he did not see each other at all, did not even come to her funeral.

At the same time, millions of Soviet children adored Aunt Valya and waited for new releases of "Spookushek", as they called "Good night, kids!"She was also the host of the programs "Visiting a Fairy Tale", "Alarm Clock", "From the Theater Lodge", the festive "Blue Lights" and the search program "From the bottom of my heart." She was lovingly called Aunt Valya of the Soviet Union, she became the only woman announcer of Central Television, awarded the title of People's Artist of the USSR.

In the 1990s. for Valentina Leontyeva, the most difficult period came: all her programs were closed, the new leadership did not see her as an announcer or presenter. She was transferred to the position of assistant director, later - a consultant in the department of sign language interpretation. At the same time, health problems began. In 2004, after an unsuccessful fall, Leontyeva had memory lapses and her eyesight deteriorated. She spent the last days with her sister in the village of Novoselki in the Ulyanovsk region, where she was buried.

In her declining years, Leontyeva lamented: “Television is no longer what it used to be. Then there was more sincerity in people, we loved our work. That is why the programs were sincere and kind. What now? Endless games and shows in which greed, immorality and greed reign."

Until the end of her days, Leontyev remembered with particular warmth about the gentle and romantic poet - such as she appears Bulat Okudzhava in the memories of women he loved