Her parents, Aleksey Dmitriyevich Ladynin (1879-1955) and Maria Naumovna (1889-1971) were uneducated peasants; the family lived in a small wooden hut and young Marina had to do most of the hard work in the house.

[4] As a schoolgirl, Marina was an avid reader; she joined the school theatre where her first role was Natasha in Pushkin’s "Rusalka", and regularly performed at the local street carnivals.

Instead she went straight to the Academy and gave an inspired performance before the jury which included celebrities like Serafima Birman and Vasily Luzhsky.

In her sophomore year she joined the Moscow Art Theatre part-time, where she debuted as the nun Taisia in Egor Bulychov and Others after Maxim Gorky, who personally expressed his delight.

Both of the MAT's directors, Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, appreciated the newcomer's talent and gave her the part of Tanya in Maxim Gorky's In the World.

[5]In 1934 the directors Ivan Pravov and Olga Preobrazhenskaya gave Ladynina the part of the teacher Linka in Enemy's Paths (Vrazhji tropy).

At the height of the Big Purge many theatres got closed, actors rushed to MAT where Stanislavski has lost his influence and Ladynina was feeling less and less comfortable.

[2] In 1936 Ladynina who just signed with the newly formed Yuri Zavadsky's troupe, was summoned to the NKVD office to testify as a 'witness' against some of her former colleagues.

For several months, she worked as a cleaner and a housemaid to make her ends meet, then met the film director Ivan Pyryev again, in their friends' house.

[2] This melodrama with Ladynina as Varya Lugina, a Moscow industrial worker who leaves her jealous husband, was received coolly and Pyryev returned to what he knew how to do well.

[4] In February 1941 Pyryev started to film They Met in Moscow, but the work had to be interrupted in June as the War broke out and most of the actors volunteered for the Red Army.

Later critics dismissed it as a 'country lubok'[note 1] but the audiences loved the romantic story of a Russian country girl from Vologda (Ladynina) and Musaib, a shepherd from the Caucasus, played by Vladimir Zeldin.

[4] Konstantin Yudin's comedy Antosha Rybkin and Pyryev's heroic drama The Raikom Secretary (both 1942) went almost unnoticed, but lyrical melodrama Six P.M. (1944) with Ladynina as Varya Pankova, a Moscow kindergarten teacher, proved immensely popular.

This musical comedy with Ladynina as singer Natasha Malinina pretended to raise serious ethical and moral questions but Sergei Eisenstein, for one, dismissed it as "Russian lubok imported from Czechoslovakia" (that was where the film had been shot).

The role of the Kolkhoz chairman Galina Peresvetova, a woman of tough character and tender heart, proved to be so difficult to handle that the actress for a time being was on the verge of quitting.

[3] Some argued that when it came to verve and charms, young Klara Luchko stole the show, but it was this hit that earned Ladynina the prestigious People's Artist of the USSR title.

In one of her last interviews she claimed: "Even today I continue to receive letters from people expressing their gratitude, they are still under the spell of those comedy luboks… which, I am convinced, had every right to deviate as far from the cruel reality towards fairytale as one would wish them to.

"[5] Now massively popular, Ladynina started to get weary of the stereotype of a happy and resolute Soviet country girl she was now firmly associated with.

She grabbed the opportunity, but all of her episodes turned out to be cut out by censors who loathed, apparently, the way her heroine sympathized with Taras instead of "hating him, as class enemy".

She divorced 58-year-old Pyryev (who fell in love with young actress Lyudmila Marchenko) and found herself in isolation: some directors received prompt orders from her ex-husband to ignore her, for others she was too much of a symbol of the Stalin's era.

Their union proved to be short-lived: the same year, while shooting The Enemy’s Path, she met 33-year-old film director Ivan Pyryev whom she married in 1936.

"She symbolized happiness itself but nobody knew what kind of person she was in reality, in fact, nobody's ever wanted to know her, for in her last years she was tragically lonesome," according to Kichin.

"At the age of 95 Marina Ladynina died a 'rich bride' of the Soviet cinema: neither we nor she herself have had a chance to discover the true extent of her gift," Kichin concluded.