Initially associated with Sergei Eisenstein, with whom he worked as a co-director, screenwriter and actor, Aleksandrov became a major director in his own right in the 1930s, when he directed Jolly Fellows and a string of other musical comedies starring his wife Lyubov Orlova.

Starting at age nine, Aleksandrov worked odd jobs at the Ekaterinburg Opera Theater, eventually making his way to assistant director.

Aleksandrov co-directed Eisenstein's next two features, October: Ten Days That Shook the World and The General Line, which were also their last works in the silent era.

Along with Eisenstein's other major collaborator, cinematographer Eduard Tisse, Aleksandrov joined the director when he came to Hollywood in the early 1930s.

He directed a pro-Stalin film, International (Интернационал), the following year and after a meeting with Stalin and Maxim Gorky, he embarked on making the first Soviet musical, Jolly Fellows, starring Leonid Utyosov and Lyubov Orlova, whom Aleksandrov later married (Orlova had been previously married to an economist who was arrested in 1930).

He made a propaganda movie Fighting Film Collection #4 with Orlova singing a new version of the famous march from Jolly Fellows: "A horde of dark villains has attacked our laboring and jolly people..."[6] At the end of October 1941, with the other Mosfilm employees, Aleksandrov and Orlova were evacuated to Alma-Ata, Kazakh SSR.

There Aleksandrov and his wife made a film A Family which was banned from being released in theatres for "poorly reflecting the struggle of the Soviet people against the German fascist invader".

[8] Aleksandrov's first postwar film was Springtime, another musical comedy starring Lyubov Orlova, as well as several other top-notch actors, including Nikolay Cherkasov, Erast Garin, and Faina Ranevskaya.

Paradoxically, Aleksandrov found it harder to work in the more politically relaxed atmosphere called "Khrushchev Thaw" that followed Stalin's death.

The level of harsh criticism about his movie Russian Souvenir (1960) was very derogatory, the satirical magazine Krokodil has published a feuilleton dedicated to the film, entitled "Is this specificity?"

Izvestia has published a letter in support of Aleksandrov, signed by Pyotr Kapitsa, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergey Obraztsov, Yuri Zavadsky and Sergei Yutkevich.

According to film critic Vitaly Vulf, the "friendship is still a subject of speculation and gossips, although there is no evidence they had had a sexual relationship.

"[16] Dobrovinsky also added: "And the legend about a fictitious relationship emerged due to the fact that Orlova and Aleksandrov never slept in bed together.

[19] According to Salys, Aleksandrov's Circus "infused Soviet reality with the Western pageantry, glamor, and showmanship he admired, while simultaneously pressing its spectacle into the service of ideology.

[22] In 2016, Russian Jewish actor Valentin Gaft said about Aleksandrov's movie: "Those [terrible] were happening and there was this film that outweighed everything.

"[23] Following America's win in a Cold War in 1991, Orlova-Aleksandrov's movies about female empowerment, their 1936 box-office hit Circus with an American Catholic protagonist especially, were blamed for setting a losing trend for USSR cinema in a so-called propaganda war, eventually losing to its 1939 analog Ninotchka trend which also included a movie Comrade X. Maya Turovskaya about Ninotchka's connection to Circus: "This is the story of how a Soviet woman from the USSR came to France and stayed there because she fell in love with the French viscount.

Finally, I would like to emphasize that many plots and images of American cinema were used in the anti-communist discourse of the perestroika with its slogans "return to normalcy", including the "natural relationships between men and women.

"[25] In 2014, Gender scholar Natalya Pushkareva wrote the comparative analysis on women in science portrayal: "The heroine of Grigory Aleksandrov's film Springtime is the first character of physicist Irina Nikitina played by Lyubov Orlova.

The scientist lived alone in a two-story, bourgeois-looking apartment with a housekeeper, she was drinking her tea from the finest porcelain and tamed solar energy.

In this plot, the main character is cheated on by her husband, with no housekeeper, she has a cruel shortage of money (and there are two children in her arms), she is not accepted by the "nano center".

And they try to put it into the minds that a women's personal happiness is more important than her success in science, and, if she wants a scientific achievement, she should look for a husband who will replace her in the family.