Aged fifteen, Natalya joined the Leninskiye Gory Pioneer Palace's youth theatre, and two years later decided to make acting her profession.

She enrolled into the Boris Shchukin Theatre Institute and joined the Katin-Yartsev's group, where her classmates were Konstantin Raikin, Yuri Bogatyryov and Natalya Varley, among others.

Her first success came with Vladimir Fetin's melodrama Sweet Woman (1977) where she played Anya Dobrokhotova, although in retrospect two of her earlier performances, in Andrey Smirnov's Autumn (1975) and Nikolai Gubenko's Wounded Game (1976), have been highly acclaimed too.

In 1979 she excelled on theatre stage as Katerina Izmaylova in Andrey Goncharov's production of Nikolai Leskov's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

In film, Gundareva created a number of multi-dimensional characters, notably Nina Buzykina in Georgiy Daneliya's Autumn Marathon (1979), that earned her the Vasiliev Brothers Prize.