Yelena Safonova was born on 14 June 1956 in Leningrad, the daughter of the famous Soviet actor Vsevolod Safonov and the film director Valeriya Ivanovna Rublyova who worked at Mosfilm.
[3] In the mid-1960s, the family moved to Moscow, where Yelena attended a special secondary school and studied French to an advanced level.
Safonova became a household name in Russia with the role of the 30-year-old divorcee Olga in the romantic comedy Winter Cherry (1985) by Igor Maslennikov.
In 1987 Yelena starred opposite Marcello Mastroianni in the romantic drama Dark Eyes by director Nikita Mikhalkov.
In the 1990 drama Taxi Blues by Pavel Lungin Safonova played Nina, wife of a saxophone player.
In 1999 Safonova portrayed a teacher who falls in love with a young acting student in Dmitry Meskhiyev's romantic drama Women's Property.
Yelena Safonova married for the first time at the age of twenty, to actor Vitaly Yushkov, whom she had met on the set of The Family of the Zatsepins (1977).