Marina Vlady, Cannes-winning French screen star, dies at 88
French actress Marina Vlady, whose career spanned almost 100 films and a Cannes best-actress prize, has died aged 88, her family has confirmed.
French actress Marina Vlady has died aged 88, her family told AFP. She died at home on Thursday 24 September 2026.
In a statement, her children said she died “at home, surrounded by her loved ones and her animals”, praising “a long and beautiful life, well lived.”
Born Catherine Marina de Poliakoff-Baïdaroff on 10 May 1938 in Clichy, near Paris, to Russian immigrant parents — her father Vladimir Poliakoff was an opera baritone and her mother Militza a dancer — she began acting at the age of 10 and went on to appear in almost 100 films across French and international cinema.
Her breakthrough came at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival, where she won the Best Actress award for Marco Ferreri’s The Conjugal Bed; the same performance also earned her a Golden Globe. Among her most notable roles were the title part in Jean Delannoy’s La Princesse de Clèves (1961), a rare English-speaking turn in Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1965), Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), Bertrand Tavernier’s Que la Fête Commence (1975) and Jean-Marie Poiré’s Twist again à Moscou (1986).
Vlady was married to the Russian singer-songwriter and actor Vladimir Vysotsky from 1970 until his death in 1980, and later wrote the memoir Vladimir, or the Aborted Flight about their relationship. Her earlier marriages were to Robert Hossein (1955–1959) and Jean-Claude Brouillet (1963–1966); she later partnered Léon Schwartzenberg from 1981 to 2003. She had three children.
Away from the screen, she campaigned for abortion rights at a time when the procedure was illegal in France and joined protests against the deportation of Arab workers.
Sources
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