How the song "She was in Paris" appeared, and Why Vysotsky's muse abroad was mistaken for a girl of easy virtue

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

Many are sure that Vladimir Vysotsky dedicated one of his most famous songs "She was in Paris" to Marina Vladi, but the lines "" had a completely different addressee. The fact is that Marina Vlady did not "have", but "lived" in Paris, besides, the poems were born a year before meeting her. But the famous Soviet actress Larisa Luzhina really often went abroad to film festivals, but when she learned that this song was about her, she got angry …

In the 1960-1970s. Larisa Luzhina was one of the most sought-after and popular Soviet actresses and one of the first beauties who were known not only in the USSR, but also abroad. Her destiny is worthy of becoming a separate plot for the film. Larisa Luzhina's childhood was spent in besieged Leningrad. Then she lost her older sister, father and grandmother, and she miraculously survived. After the war, she and her mother moved to live with relatives in Tallinn, where they huddled in a 6-meter room. The first time she had to sleep on chairs - there was not even a bed there. The family lived very poorly, and later the actress admitted that the main sensation of her childhood was hunger.

Larisa Luzhina dreamed of acting as a child, when she began attending the school drama club. After graduation, she tried to enter the theater institute in Leningrad, but did not qualify for the competition. I had to get a job at a pharmaceutical, and then at a confectionery factory. Her fate could have turned out completely differently, if one day she had not decided to try herself in the role of a fashion model. Once she saw an advertisement in the newspaper that the girls were being invited to a "viewing" (the word "casting" was not yet there) at the Model House. Larisa was very thin, which is why she was teased at school as a "punt" and she was taken to the show of teenage models.

Then the profession of a fashion model was not only not prestigious, but was also considered a frivolous occupation. Because of this, Luzhina even had to leave her job as a secretary in the Estonian Ministry of Health - her bosses were against employees doing such a "reprehensible" case. She herself recalled that this work was not a continuous holiday - during fittings she had to stand for hours in the same position, after which her whole body ached. But thanks to fashion shows and the fact that her photographs appeared in the fashion magazine "Silhouette", directors drew attention to the beauty of Luzhina and offered her a cameo role in the film "Crashers". On the set, she met actress Leida Layus, and she showed her photographs to director Sergei Gerasimov. After that, Luzhin was invited to audition and accepted into VGIK.

The first success came to her after filming the film "On Seven Winds" with Stanislav Rostotsky. The picture was shown at international festivals, and together with Luzhin's group in 1962 presented the film in Cannes. For this trip, she was sent two beautiful dresses from the Model House in Tallinn, and in France, the emigrant Nadezhda Leger, the wife of a French fashion designer, gave her another one, in which she made a splash. All newspapers then wrote: "". After Cannes, she attended film festivals in Dublin, Oslo, Warsaw and even went to Iran. And upon returning to the USSR, Stanislav Govorukhin invited her to the shooting of the film "Vertical", where the main role was played by Vladimir Vysotsky.

The actress had conflicting impressions about these shootings. On the one hand, she was happy to work in such a team, on the other hand, she could hardly endure the conditions in which they were for 5 months. The shooting took place high in the Elbrus mountains, the group lived in tents on a glacier, where it was very cold. But then Luzhina admitted that she had never seen anything more beautiful than this landscape in her life. In addition, the atmosphere on the set was unique: "". Thanks to the participation of Vysotsky, the film "Vertical" became a cult and brought the actress incredible popularity.

At that time, Luzhina was married to cameraman Alexei Chardinin, who was friends with Vysotsky, and the poet often visited them. He showed signs of attention to Larisa, but she did not reciprocate. Once Luzhina told him how, during a trip to Paris, she wanted to take a walk around the city, but their delegations were forbidden to leave the hotel in the evenings, and she walked up and down the next street. Later, the actress said with a laugh: "".

When Luzhin told this story to Vysotsky, he laughed, and later admitted that he dedicated a song to her. When the actress first heard her, she was outraged: "". At first it seemed to her that the addressee of these poems was a too frivolous young lady, and therefore for a long time she did not admit that the lines were addressed to her. This secret was revealed in an interview by Stanislav Govorukhin, and Luzhin was bombarded with questions about the affair with Vysotsky, which in fact did not exist. She still patiently explains to reporters that they were connected only by friendly relations, and Vysotsky's hobby quickly passed. Subsequently, they did not keep in touch and only greeted when they met.

After that, Vysotsky met Marina Vlady and soon married her, and Larisa Luzhina married three more times, but in her declining years she was left alone. The actress admitted: "".

The film "On the Seven Winds" remained her most famous work; during the perestroika era, the actress almost stopped acting and returned to the screens only in the early 2000s, when she began to be offered roles in the series. And in adulthood, she looks great, but regrets that she could not fully realize her creative potential - despite more than 100 works in filmography, many of her roles turned out to be passing and were not noticed by the audience.

The song "She was in Paris" might not have been, since during her first visit abroad, Larisa Luzhina aroused the anger of Ekaterina Furtseva herself and almost became "restricted to travel abroad." Furtseva's black list: Who and why fell out of favor with "Catherine the Great" of Soviet culture.