Ksenia Kuprina was born in 1908, to Alexander Kuprin and his second wife Elizaveta Geinrich (1882–1942), a daughter of the Hungarian revolutionary Morits Rotoni-Geinrich.

Kissa Kouprine, as by then she has been known, appeared in eleven films, starting with Le Diable au cœur (1927, with Betty Balfour) by Marcel L'Herbier.

In the 1930s she was romantically involved with Jean Marais, and became friends with the yet unknown singer, Edith Piaf, on whom she would later write a book in Russian.

where she worked as stage actress, scriptwriter, translator and later memoirist, who had massive success with her book Kuprin Is My Father (Куприн - мой отец, 1971).

She did not receive a dime from all the re-issues of her famous father's books, was refused an audience by the Khrushchev government's Minister of Culture Ekaterina Furtseva, never got a decent part at the Moscow Pushkin Drama Theatre ("Here I am anonymous actress," she once remarked)[3] and for many years had to rely on her 100-ruble pension, according to the biographer Vladimir Obolensky.