Alice Freundlich - 85: What the famous actress prefers not to remember

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

December 8 marks 85 years of one of the most famous and beloved Russian actresses, People's Artist of the USSR Alisa Brunovna Freundlich. She usually spends her birthdays on stage, because the theater has long become her second home. Her colleagues say that it is there that you can see her real one, because in life she is a rather closed person and for many remains a mystery. What memories became the most painful for her and other little-known facts of her biography - further in the review.

The father of the actress, Bruno Freundlich, was a famous theater and film actor. His parents moved to Russia from Germany in the 18th century. - hence the German surname. The mother wanted to name her daughter Natasha, but thanks to the intervention of her father, the girl received the name Alice. When the blockade of Leningrad began, she was only 7 years old. These memories are one of the most difficult for her, and the actress still does not like to talk about it. At the very beginning of the war, Alice's parents broke up. My father was evacuated with the Youth Theater in the city of Berezniki, where he had another family. In 1944, they had a daughter, Irina, Alice's half-sister. And the girl herself, together with her mother, spent the whole war in Leningrad - her mother worked at a military plant and was not subject to expulsion.

She said more than once that their grandmother's German pedantry helped them survive during the blockade - she gave out bread rations to all family members strictly by the hour, and thanks to her frugality at first, everyone survived at the expense of pre-war supplies. Charlotte Fridrikhovna herself died on the train in 1942 on her way to evacuation. Later, Alisa Freundlich admitted that she owes many character traits to her grandmother - first of all, it is pedantry, punctuality and love of order in affairs and personal records.

Before the war, German origin for Alice was not a problem - in their house there were often relatives and friends of her grandmother, with whom she spoke German, for the children they hired a tutor who taught them German. But with the beginning of the war, the attitude towards their family changed dramatically, the name Freundlich sounded like a sentence. Her father's brother and wife were arrested and then shot; other German relatives were expelled from the city. Bruno Freundlich escaped reprisals only because he was evacuated. Alice and her mother stayed alone in Leningrad - although her mother bore a German surname by her husband, she was Russian by nationality, and her daughter also had “Russian” written on her birth certificate, which saved them then.

After the war, Alisa's mother married a naval officer who was sent to serve in Estonia, and they moved with him to Tallinn, where they lived for the next 3 years. And after their divorce, Alice and her mother returned to Leningrad again. Mother got a job in an office that rented costumes for theaters, and Alice began to study in a school theater group. Probably, this was the beginning of her romance with the theater.

Ever since the school theater, Alisa Freundlich got used to the idea that the roles of romantic heroines are not for her. She got either male roles (there were no boys in the girls' school), or character roles. So since then it has become a custom that on stage she played boys and old women. One of her most famous theatrical roles is the Kid from the play "Kid and Carlson". Alisa had an ear for music and a good voice, from childhood she studied vocals, so after school she hesitated for some time whether she should go to a theater university or a conservatory. But her father discouraged her from a musical career, drawing attention to the fact that Alice was too small for the opera stage. So she became a singing dramatic actress.

Alisa Freundlich has been acting in films since she was 20, but for a long time she only got episodic roles, and she remained in the shadow of beautiful actresses. Her creative destiny in cinema was absolutely unique and atypical: only after 40 years did she start getting leading roles and playing heroines.

Most of the films in which Alisa Freundlich played have become classics of Soviet cinema. They are so often shown on different TV channels that many viewers perceive the actress as if she were their old acquaintance or relative. On the screens, she seems open, sincere, close. But behind the scenes for many it remains a mystery. Mikhail Boyarsky, who more than once became her partner on the set, said: "". Alisa Freundlich, in her own words, treats each of her roles as a child born in pain.

Unlike her creative path, the actress's personal life was not so happy. She was married three times, but all 3 marriages broke up. Freundlich spoke about the reasons for this briefly: "".

The actress continues to act in films even in adulthood, although, on average, new films with her participation have recently been released no more than once every 2 years. Freundlich explains it this way: "". It remains only to congratulate Alisa Brunovna on her birthday and wish her the necessary balance of vital and creative forces and many years to come!

The actress gained nationwide popularity in no small measure thanks to the director Eldar Ryazanov, but this could have happened much earlier: Three missed roles of Alice Freundlich.