Lyubov Orlova

Born January 29, 1902.

Died January 26, 1975.

The first Soviet movie star and sex symbol.

Stalin’s favorite film actress and a highly gifted singer.

When Lyuba Orlova was seven, the great singer Fyodor Shalyapin, a family friend, predicted that she would be a great actress. What she would have become, had there not been a Bolshevik Revolution, is of course unknown. Quite possibly she might have married a man of noble origins and ended up a common housewife: going to balls, receiving guests, raising children, reading books and playing music to better her soul. But there was a Revolution, and Lyuba’s future, whatever it might have been, changed radically.

In the hungry decade of the 1920s, the family kept a cow. Lyuba and her sister Nonna took care of it, milking it and hauling milk cans about Moscow to sell. At 15, Lyuba damaged her hands terribly from the heavy work and from that day forward was very self-conscious of them. She constantly wore gloves, and in her films her hands were almost never shown in close-up.

Orlova was discovered when she was playing mainly episodic roles at MKhAT. In 1933, the director Boris Yurtsev invited Orlova to act in his silent film Alyona’s Love. Then followed the role of Grushenka, in the film Petersburg Night. Both films debuted in 1934, but neither was successful. Then, at the end of December 1934, the film Jolly Fellows (Веселые ребята) was released and overnight Orlova became a superstar.

The film was the creation of 31-year-old director Grigory Alexandrov, who had got his start in film in 1924, as an assistant to Sergei Eisenstein. Alexandrov dreamed of shooting the first Soviet musical comedy. When, in 1933, he attended a performance at MKhAT’s musical theater, he saw the brilliant, 30-year-old Orlova. The young director was immediately captivated, and not only by her performance... They were soon married, and stayed together for the next 40 years.

Orlova’s marriage to Grigory Alexandrov became her lucky ticket. The talented director introduced the musical to Soviet filmmaking, and this new style of film was infused with the brilliance of Orlova’s musical-theatrical gifts. Each of her films with Alexandrov was a work of art: Circus (1936), Volga-Volga (1938).

Lyubov Orlova greatness was her universality. She did not have any doubles, but did all her own singing and dancing. She dove into water from high perches and swung on trapezes under the big top. None of her fans could imagine the force of character and iron discipline this required of the young actress.

During the war, when the fascists were on the outskirts of Moscow and panic gripped the city (October 16), someone got the idea that the city’s residents could be calmed if concert posters for Orlova were posted up everywhere. Indeed, many were comforted by this: if Orlova herself was in the city, of course it would not be given up; there was nothing to fear.

After his wife’s death in 1975, Grigory Alexandrov lived another eight and a half years. In 1983 he completed the documentary film Lyubov Orlova, after which his mission on Earth was complete. On December 16 of that year, he died at the age of 80. He was buried in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery, alongside Orlova.