Secrets of Lyubov Orlova: What the legendary actress was silent about

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

45 years ago, on January 26, 1975, one of the most famous Soviet actresses known not only in the USSR but also abroad, Lyubov Orlova, passed away. Her name has become synonymous with eternal youth and impeccable beauty, she was not just an actress - a real # 1 star, a movie star who was legendary. Already in our days, many myths have appeared about her: they said that she owed her glory to Stalin, that her marriage with the director Grigory Alexandrov was fictitious, that she was the first of the Soviet stars to start doing plastic surgery, but not all of this was true. What secrets did Orlova actually hide?

The first secret was related to her birth and origin. The date of her birth was indicated in the actress's passport: January 29 (February 11, new style) 1902. However, some of her acquaintances claimed that in fact she was born earlier. Faina Ranevskaya stated: "".

According to Ranevskaya, once Grigory Alexandrov invited her to play the grandmother of Lyubov Orlova, which made the actress very indignant - after all, they were almost the same age! Knowing the sharp tongue of Ranevskaya, Orlova's biographers believed that 10 years is an obvious exaggeration, but at the same time they admitted that Lyubov Petrovna was cunning about her age.

Many biographies of Lyubov Orlova claim that her family came from Count Grigory Orlov, the favorite of Empress Catherine II, but this version seems far-fetched and unfounded to many researchers. It is only known for certain that the grandfather of the actress Fyodor Orlov was a real state councilor and was married to the noblewoman Anastasia Vashkevich. They had 3 daughters and 1 son - Peter Fedorovich, the father of Lyubov Orlova. He belonged to the nobility of the Poltava province. Orlova's mother, Evgenia Sukhotina, came from an old noble family and was related to Leo Tolstoy (her uncle was married to his eldest daughter).

However, there is no exact information about Orlova's distant ancestors. According to some assumptions, her family descended from the younger brother of Grigory Orlov Fyodor, according to others, it appeared later and had nothing to do with them, since the actress's great-grandfather was a military doctor born in the family of a priest. In any case, in Soviet times, Lyubov Orlova preferred not to mention her noble childhood. In the questionnaire, in the column "origin", she wrote: "From employees."

In our time, publications often appear in which it is argued that Lyubov Orlova owed her meteoric rise in her career to Stalin, who favored the actress, and her husband, director Grigory Alexandrov. Envious and ill-wishers were sure that the actress was Stalin's mistress. However, according to the official version, Orlova saw him only once - during a gala reception on the occasion of awarding art workers. And the actress used this opportunity to find out about the fate of her first husband, Andrei Berzin, the former Deputy People's Commissar of Agriculture. She has not heard of him since he was arrested. Then Orlova found out that he was alive and in exile.

Some publications say that the director and actress were never actually husband and wife, and that their marriage was a kind of mutually beneficial partnership, where both were interested in each other purely for career reasons. However, in this case, their marriage would hardly have lasted 42 years! At the same time, both did not get tired of thanking each other for the years spent together, and constantly wrote notes with declarations of love.

It would seem that an unconditional fact is that Lyubov Orlova was one of the first beauties of Soviet cinema, but this statement is also repeatedly disputed today. They say that the image of the eternally young goddess of the screen is the work of Orlova herself and her husband, one of the main myths created by the spouses.

Probably the most common myth about Orlova is that she was one of the first to resort to the help of plastic surgeons and performed almost a dozen operations abroad. The biographer of the actress Mikhail Kunitsyn writes: "".

In turn, the actress's husband made sure that she always looked spectacular in the frame. Black and white shooting in soft light was the most beneficial for appearance, Orlova was filmed at certain angles and with illumination from below - this smoothed out wrinkles and had a minimum of shadows on the face. The star has always tried to avoid amateur photographs, especially in adulthood. Aleksandrov "sculpted" from her a film star in the image of Marlene Dietrich, whom he saw during his trips abroad, and turned the brunette Orlova into a dazzling blonde.

One of the most powerful phobias of the actress was the fear of old age. When she turned 70 in 1972, she personally asked the party leadership not to mention her age in the press. And this request was fulfilled! And after 2 years Orlova, after a long pause, starred in the film "Starling and Lyra", where she played a 25-year-old heroine. However, this time, despite all the efforts of the film crew, it was not possible to hide her age on the screens. And the witches immediately renamed this film Sclerosis and Menopause.

During the scoring of the film, the actress became ill, she was taken to the hospital. At the request of her husband, the doctors hid the diagnosis from her - pancreatic cancer. She never returned home from there - on January 26, 1975 she was gone. She kept her secrets to the end - the coffin lid was not opened at the cemetery, and no one saw how death changed her features.

Today they say about her that the best role she played is the role of herself. Probably, it really was so, and all her life she existed between myth and reality, but without this the legend would not have been born …

An indisputable fact was that which in publications about the actress is often forgotten to mention - she owed her success not only to her husband's concerns, but also to her talent, ability to work and sacrifice in the profession: Why was Lyubov Orlova taken away from the filming of the film "Circus" in an ambulance.