In 1925 the family moved to Moscow where the girl, who had the perfect pitch, joined the piano class at the prestigious Gnessin State Musical College.

While still a student, she joined the staff of the Moscow Vakhtangov Theatre and made her debut there as Clarice in Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni.

[3] After the Aerial Cabman's premiere Tselikovskaya appeared in Sergei Eisenstein's historical epic Ivan the Terrible as Tsarina Anastasiya, the part initially intended for Galina Ulanova.

[3] After the War Tselikovskaya appeared in Konstantin Yudin's Twins (1945) and then The Busy Estate which Zharov wrote and directed specifically for his wife in 1946.

The War-themed romantic comedy in which Tselikovskaya played corporal Tonya, pestered by suitors, all of them heroic pilots, was a star-studded affair (with Zharov as sergeant major Semibaba and Sergey Filippov a German spy) but was received coolly by the critics who accused its makers of 'pandering for bad tastes' and 'the lack of progressive ideas'.

[3] Zinochka, a sister of mercy in Aleksandr Stolper's adaptation of Boris Polevoy's The Tale of a Proper Man (1948), could have marked a turning point in Tselikovskaya's career in film, but her dramatic performance failed to impress other directors who were willing only to exploit her naïve ingénue image.

Her most significant theatre roles of this period were Denise de Flavigny (Mam'zelle Nitouche), Tsarina Maria Nagaya (The Great Tsar, Vladimir Solovyov's play) and Geneura (Deep Roots, by James Gow and Arnaud d'Usseau).

Her fourth husband, a successful Soviet architect Karo Alabyan (whom she married in 1948, after divorcing Zharov), suddenly fell out of favour with Lavrenty Beria.

[3] Tselikovskaya's best-known film of the 1950s was Samson Samsonov's The Grasshopper (after Anton Chekhov's short story of the same name) where she played Olga, Dymov's wife.

Alabyan's death in 1959 marked the beginning of another lean period for Tselikovskaya, which, despite her getting the People's Artist of the RSFSR title in 1963, continued well into her old age.

The Theatre several times came out with the suggestion, but for the officials the very fact of her being Lyubimov's civil wife was enough to warrant a rejection," Tselikovskaya's son, Aleksandr Alabyan, later insisted.