Marina Ladynina

Marina Alekseyevna Ladynina (russian: Мари́на Алексе́евна Лады́нина; June 24 .s. 11 1908 in Skotinino, Smolensk, Russian Empire – March 10, 2003 in Moscow, Russian Federation) was a popular Soviet film and theatre actress, best remembered for her leading roles in ''Tractor Drivers'' (1939), '' The Swine Girl and the Shepherd'' (1941), '' Six O'Clock after the War is Over'' (1944), ''Ballad of Siberia'' (1947) and ''Cossacks of the Kuban. In 1950 Ladynina was honoured with the People's Artist of the USSR title. She was a five-times Stalin Prize laureate.

Biography

Early life

Marina Ladynina was born in Skotinino village, Smolensk, the eldest of four children, and spent her early years in Nazarovo, near Achinsk in Eniseisk governorate, Siberia. 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. She spent summers as a hired worker at a local farm, milking cows.

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. In her teens Marina became a part-time actress at the Achinsk Drama theater. Upon graduation, aged sixteen, Ladynina went on to work as teacher in Nazarovo. She continued to perform in Achinsk and give musical performances there too, but was now determined to go to Moscow for further education. Her first port of call was Smolensk, where she met Sergey Fadeyev, the Meyerhold Theatre actor who advised her to go and take exams at the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts. By a happy coincidence the regional komsomol committee delegated Ladynina to Moscow to study social sciences. Instead she went straight to the Academy and gave an inspired performance before the jury which included celebrities like Serafima Birman and Vasily Luzhsky. She was instantly in, marked as "remarkably gifted" on the register list, which meant she was free from taking any further exams.

Career

In 1929 Ladynina debuted on screen, in a silent move ''Do Not Enter This Town''. 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. Then followed "In the World" (V Lyudyakh), another adaptation of the Gorky's text. In 1933 Ladynina played a blind flower girl in ''Prosperity'', directed by Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky. That year she graduated from the Academy and joined the Moscow Art Theatre full-time.

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''. Stanislavsky, writing to his sister, called Ladynina "the future of MAT". Ladynina remembered:

They really loved me in the theatre. Mikhail Yanshin, Ilya Sudakov, Alexey Gribov, Boris Livanov

In 1934 the directors Ivan Pravov and Olga Preobrazhenskaya gave Ladynina the part of the teacher Linka in ''Enemy's Paths'' (Vrazhji tropy). It was there that she met both actor Ivan Lyubeznov, whom she soon married, and director Ivan Pyryev. Another film she starred in, ''The Post at the Devil's Ford'' (directed by Miron Bilinsky in 1936) was pronounced 'ideologically wrong' and shelved.

"Sure, you ought to be filmed, one has to do such things, for money and all that. Just do not forget that you belong to us, and never leave theatre for good," Nemirovich-Danchenko was telling her. In retrospect, she failed to heed this advice and later regretted it. There were objective reasons for this, though. 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.

Career in film

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. Since none of the evidence she gave was found 'useful', the officer told her to forget about theatre and watch out for a case to be opened against herself soon. As both Zavadsky and Lyubeznov departed to Rostov-on-Don, Ladynina was left behind, unemployed and penniless. 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. He proposed, and in 1936 they married.

This stormy marriage proved to be artistically fruitful. In 1937 Pyryev talked Ladynina into leaving the theatre and took her to Kiev to shoot ''Rich Bride''. "Forget about Stanislavski and your ex-husband: from now on, only cinema matters. We'll work without any breaks," he was saying. ''Rich Bride'' caused controversy. The bosses of the Ukrainfilm labeled the film 'nationalistic' and accused the authors of conspiring to make fun of the Ukrainian language. The Ukrainian film industry boss Boris Shumyatsky labeled the film ' vreditelsky' and shelved it. Several months later Shumyatsky himself was arrested and executed as 'vreditel'. His follower Dukelsky, an NKVD man, sent the film to Moscow for affirmation. Stalin liked it immensely and the happy future of the Pyryev-Ladynina tandem was sealed. In 1939 both the director and his leading actress received their respective Orders of Lenin for that film. Everybody seemed happy except for Nemirovich-Danchenko who, after seeing ''The Rich Bride'', accused Pyryev of "corrupting a fine actress".

Stardom

To cast his wife in ''Tractor Drivers'' (1939) Pyryev had to overcome the resistance of the chairman of the Soviet Cinema committee Dukelsky who did not want to see Ladynina as a tractor brigadier Maryana Bazhan. Pyryev won out. "Marina had to speed across the steppe on a motorcycle, ride a tractor... She was doing all this so professionally, as if that was what she used to do her whole life - driving tractors and competing in motor rallies," the director later marveled. The film (which also launched the career of the actor Boris Andreev) made husband and wife famous. The Soviet press lauded Pyryev as "a father of the kolkhoz-based musical comedy," and Ladynina became the first superstar of this peculiar Soviet genre.

Pyryev, who on the day of his proposal promised his beloved one to never give her a day of rest, fulfilled his promise. Yet, when right after the ''Tractor Drivers'' she directly asked him: "Am I supposed to play kolkhoz women for the rest of my life?", he promised to think about it and soon handed her the script of ''Sweetheart'', after Pavel Nilin's novelet. 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.

In February 1941 Pyryev started to film ''The Swine Girl and the Shepherd'', but the work had to be interrupted in June as the War broke out and most of the actors volunteered for the Red Army. Shot in the now empty Mosfilm studios, it came out in November 1941. Later critics dismissed it as a 'country lubok'Popular Soviet media term for something simple, flashy and 'too folky'. 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. This paean to the friendship of Soviet nations became highly relevant and extremely popular at the frontlines where people of different ethnic groups fought against the Nazis side by side.

Konstantin Yudin's comedy ''Antosha Rybkin'' and Pyryev's heroic drama ''The Raikom Secretary'' (both 1942) went almost unnoticed, but lyrical melodrama ''Six O'Clock after the War is Over'' (1944) with Ladynina as Varya Pankova, a Moscow kindergarten teacher, proved immensely popular. Another hit, ''Ballad of Siberia'' (1947) ended up 3rd in the 1948 box-office rating. This musical comedy with Ladynina as singer Natasha Malinina pretended to raise serious ethical and moral questions but Sergey Eisenstein, for one, dismissed it as "Russian lubok imported from Czechoslovakia" (that was where the film had been shot).

''Cossacks of the Kuban

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