[1] One of his 19th century paternal ancestors was a Welsh jockey who (along with his brother) had been invited to Russia to manage a horse-breeding factory, married a Russian and settled there.

[2][3][4] Natalya's mother, Ariadna Sergeyevna Varley (née Senyavina), a granddaughter of geologist Yevgeny Barbot de Marni, was of French and German origins, a distant relative to Alexey K.

In the late 1950s, as the family settled in Moscow, she entered the Tsvetnoy Boulevard Circus's Children Studio and made quick progress there, which was all the more impressive, considering she'd been a sickly child and suffered from rheumatism-related heart disorder, which for several years prevented her from taking part in sports at school.

[6] According to Gaidai, Varley has won him with her ingénue charms, but she later opined that one particular episode might have proved to be the decisive one....So I came to Mosfilm, read a script fragment and did the donkey scene.

Years later, when Varley embarked upon successful musical career (to often perform the famous song very close to the original) and herself became a well-known voiceover artist, doubts as to the wisdom of such a move were raised.

Natasha would have done exactly the same [as Vedishcheva and Rumayntseva did], except that maybe less forcefully," fellow actress and Gaidai's wife Nina Grebeshkova (cast in the film as a psychiatry ward doctor) later opined.

This sudden fame made her none the richer: Varley claims to have been paid 300 rubles (two average Soviet monthly wages) for the blockbuster the popularity of which never waned.

Here Varley provided another striking performance, now as Pannochka, a murdered witch, rising off her coffin to torment and finally kill a hapless seminary student (played by Leonid Kuravlyov), who had inadvertently brought about her death.

Four directors came and went in the course of seven years; a long vacation had to be taken due to pregnancy (in 1972 she gave birth to her first son Vladimir) and the general atmosphere of jealousy, ill-will and petty intrigue proved to be utterly depressing for Varley.

[5] Varley continued to be filmed throughout the 1980s, but despite some minor successes (The Great Attraction, My Father Is an Idealist, I Don't Want to Be an Adult) her career in cinema was ostensibly in decline.

In the mid-1990s (after The Wizard of the Emerald City, 1994, where she played both of the two wicked witches) Varley retired, explaining this decision with her dissatisfaction with the dire quality of the scripts she'd been offered.

[8] A devout Christian, Varley took part in several public actions of protest against what she saw as the 'satanic tendencies' in the democratic Russia's cinema and modern art where scandalous 'performances' became the norm, like that of Avdey Ter-Oganyan who infamously destroyed icons with an axe in the Moscow Manege.

[11] In 1967 Natalya Varley married actor Nikolay Burlyaev, to a dismay of her circle of friends who tried to put it to her how passionately her fellow student Leonid Filatov was in love with her.