"You can't take me with your bare hands!": How Tatyana Vasilyeva fought with her complexes

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

February 28 marks 71 years of the popular actress of theater and cinema, People's Artist of the Russian Federation Tatiana Vasilyeva … These numbers are hard to believe - at her age, the actress looks much younger than her age. She is fit, energetic and self-confident, but before that Tatyana Vasilyeva suffered from many complexes - from worries about a non-standard appearance and ending with doubts about her professional abilities.

Tatyana Vasilyeva (nee Itsykovich) says that as a child she consisted of some complexes. She was worried about her appearance, because of the difficult to pronounce Jewish surname, and about the fact that she could not show her abilities at school due to painful shyness, and she was put on the back desk with the worst student in the class. At the age of 17, she even wanted to commit suicide - her appearance seemed so absurd to her: tall, disproportionate figure, irregular facial features. The girl considered herself a clumsy dildo.

In her youth, she could not share her experiences with anyone, and the acting profession was for her a means of dealing with complexes. Unbeknownst to her parents, she attended a theater club, where at the very first lesson she was asked to shout loudly. She did not succeed, and the teacher told her: "If you learn to shout - come." She learned and was accepted. That's how all her life she had to overcome herself in order to achieve the desired results.

When, after school, she decided to enter the capital's theater university, her parents thought that she had gone to Moscow on an excursion. She was admitted to the Moscow Art Theater School, and they had to come to terms with the choice of their daughter, although her father believed that an actress was not a profession. After graduation, Tatyana Vasilyeva became an actress at the Moscow Theater of Satire. There she was advised to change her last name - a popular artist could not bear the name Itsykovich. Therefore, when she married actor Anatoly Vasiliev in 1973, she took his last name without hesitation, and has not changed it since.

In 1980 a new actor came to their theater - Georgy Martirosyan. Their joint work in the play developed into a whirlwind romance. Vasilyeva left her husband and remarried 6 days after the divorce. This marriage lasted longer, but in the end it also fell apart. Both her husbands were actors, but Vasilyeva claims that this is a female profession, and that there are no real men in the acting environment. She says about her marriages: “You know, I imagine love differently. And the way it was with me, it had little to do with love. A woman should be taken care of simply as a close person whom you are afraid of losing … I have never felt this.” Therefore, she stopped looking and after two marriages did not marry again.

Tatyana Vasilyeva has always been a sought-after actress, even during the crisis of the 1990s. In total, she played in more than a hundred films, but she cannot name her favorite role among them - since in none of the works she was 100 percent satisfied with herself. But it was the profession that helped her to get rid of complexes: “At one fine moment I suddenly felt that I was capturing the viewer, I knew how to keep his attention, which meant she was beautiful. And the complexes disappeared as if by themselves."

Since she always believed that she was not a beauty by nature, she treated beauty as a work of human hands and constantly worked on herself.“To be beautiful, semantic, interesting is very important. This is not a burden to me, because nothing special is required for this: you must be well-groomed, you must have good skin, and everything is in your hands. It takes tons of cream for me, and at any moment, if I have to undress on stage, I will not feel any awkwardness, because I take care of myself,”says the artist.

Every day she goes to the gym, prefers healthy food and looks after her health. Vasilieva does not deny that she turned to plastic surgeons for help, and does not see anything reprehensible in this.

Today she says: “You cannot be afraid of life. You have to accept it. This is probably why the artist still manages to maintain the same spontaneity and charm that were inherent in her from a young age: what they were like in childhood and what movie stars have become