Marina Vlady

Marina Vlady was a French actress who started on screen as a child and went on to a career in French and Italian films. Born Marina De Poliakoff-Baïdaroff in Clichy, France, she was the youngest of four acting sisters and trained in dance before finding her way to acting. Her early credits included Summer Storm (1949), in which she played a young roller-skater, Black Feathers (1952) and Too Young for Love (1953), and she took on sharp-edged, unsympathetic characters as easily as saucy comedy. She won the Cannes Film Festival's Best Actress prize in 1963 for The Conjugal Bed and was nominated for a Golden Globe, and among her directors were Jean-Luc Godard and Christian-Jaque. She also appeared in The Wicked Go to Hell, Double Agents and Night Is Not for Sleep, and had one of her few English-language roles in Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight (1965). Later work included a good deal of television. She died in 2026.