She was absolutely careless and couldn't plan family budget which led to grand scandals involving her husband – Vasily Ivanovich Zelyoniy, a low-ranking official, a stingy and generally unsympathetic man, as Rina described him.

Rina along with her mother and younger sister decided to join him and traveled to Odessa, but it turned out Vasily Zelyoniy had left the family for another woman.

[3] Rina got sick with typhus along the way and as soon as she recovered, she joined the Odessa KROT theatre led by Viktor Tipot and Vera Inber, and that's where her career really started.

Although she appeared briefly in such well-known films as The Foundling (1939), for which she also co-wrote the script, Zelyonaya earned her living by touring the country and performing humorous skits from the life of children.

She was later buried in Vvedenskoye Cemetery near her husband – a famous Georgian architect Konstantine Topuridze (1905—1977), designer of The Stone Flower Fountain in Moscow with whom they had spent 40 years together.