Remembering Marina Vlady, the cinema icon who embodied the ‘mysterious Russian soul’ for Europeans. To Soviet audiences, she was an enigmatic French star — and bard Vladimir Vysotsky’s muse.

French actress Marina Vlady died on September 24 at 88. Born outside Paris to a Russian émigré family, she often played women with a “mysterious Russian soul” in European films — perhaps because of her background. Soviet audiences first knew her as the enigmatic witch in André Michel’s melodrama “The Blonde Witch,” and only later as Vladimir Vysotsky’s muse and wife. She appeared in numerous Italian films, including films with Marcello Mastroianni, and won the Best Actress award at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival for “A Modern Story: The Queen Bee.” Film critic Anton Dolin looks back on an actress whose story extends far beyond one famous romance.

Whatever the world thought of Marina Vlady’s talent, in the Russian-speaking world she would forever be Vladimir Vysotsky’s muse, lover, and wife. The myth of the French film star’s happy yet tragic union with the Soviet bard whose work was partly suppressed has an enduring hold on the Russian imagination.

Political barriers, censorship, and other obstacles failed to stop their romance. It lasted 10 years — the final decade of the poet’s short life. The legend grew out of real events but soon eclipsed them, overshadowing Vlady’s own fame and charisma.

Yet when “The Blonde Witch,” with Vlady in the title role, screened in Soviet theaters, her otherworldly appearance seemed to be the source of her magic. If an apocryphal story is to be believed, Vysotsky fell in love with her then, long before they met, and vowed to make her his wife.

After the bard died in 1980, having dedicated so many poems and songs to her, many tried to separate Vlady from Vysotsky — much as, in the legend of Tristan and Isolde, a wall was deliberately built between their graves. Vysotsky’s heirs and friends were particularly outraged by Vlady’s novelistic memoir “Vladimir, or the Interrupted Flight” (1989). They accused her of inaccuracies and exaggerations, and of dwelling on uncomfortable truths about the poet’s alcohol and drug addictions. But the book about love and codependency, which Vlady later adapted for the stage, only cemented the myth. It became an instant bestseller when it appeared in the Soviet Union during perestroika.

Across the former Soviet empire, fascination — if not infatuation — with Marina Vlady always seemed out of proportion to how little audiences knew of her extensive body of work, encompassing roughly 100 film roles. For most people, she remained, above all, the poet’s muse.

How might her admirers have seen her differently if they had watched more of her films? Her talent was more varied and profound than the handful of films widely shown in the Soviet Union suggested. Even after Vlady joined the French Communist Party, many of her films could not be released there.

Vlady’s rise to fame in the 1950s began much like Brigitte Bardot’s — and the two were often compared. From a young age, she played an unattainable object of desire for rough-edged men, usually older than she was. The sexual revolution had yet to arrive, and Vlady’s characters turned heads with their mix of untamed innocence and apparent openness. Lionello De Felice’s touching, amusing “First Love” (1953) and, especially, “Days of Love” (1954), directed by the neorealist master Giuseppe De Santis and pairing her with Marcello Mastroianni, made her name.

Thrillers and noirs followed in quick succession during her marriage to Robert Hossein, the leading heartthrob of French cinema: “The Wicked Go to Hell” (1955), “Pardon Our Sins” (1956), “You Are Poison” and “Freedom Under Surveillance” (1958), and “Night of Spies” (1959). Vlady worked constantly, quickly moved from supporting parts to leading roles, and became an undisputed star.

Even early in her career, though, she showed she was no ordinary actress. André Cayatte’s drama “Before the Deluge” (1954), deservedly recognized by the Cannes jury, is proof enough.

In the early 1960s, Vlady took a new direction. She became more selective about projects and directors, drawn to unconventional auteur films. Jean Delannoy’s “The Princess of Cleves” (1961), adapted by Jean Cocteau from Madame de Lafayette’s book, is a subtle, intelligent adaptation of the first psychological novel in French literature. Vlady starred alongside Jean Marais.

“A Modern Story: The Queen Bee” (1963) essentially defined the style of the great provocateur Marco Ferreri and launched his directing career. The film earned Vlady a well-deserved acting award at Cannes. She plays the devout Regina, who marries a bachelor named Alfredo (Ugo Tognazzi). Regina proves less naïve than she appears: she bends her husband to her will, gradually drives him to his death, and gives birth to an heir. Cut for release in most countries, the film caused a scandal. It was seen as a brazen challenge to Catholic morality and “traditional values.”

In 1967, Vlady appeared in “Two or Three Things I Know About Her,” a concept-driven film by Jean-Luc Godard, the most radical director of the time. Her character, Juliette, is a mother and a sex worker in her spare time. Looking into the camera, she delivers manifesto-like monologues about capitalism and the Vietnam War. Around the same period, Vlady played a small English-speaking role in “Chimes at Midnight” (1965), Orson Welles’s finest late film, based on Shakespeare’s plays. Later she worked with leading directors Bertrand Tavernier (“Let Joy Reign Supreme,” 1975), Márta Mészáros (“The Two of Them,” 1977, the only film in which she appeared with Vysotsky), and Ettore Scola (“Splendor,” 1989, her final pairing with Mastroianni).

Despite experimenting with genres, forms, and roles, Vlady could never escape the stereotype that cast her, at least in Europe, as the embodiment of the “mysterious Russian soul.”

The daughter of White Russian émigrés — opera singer Vladimir Polyakov-Baidarov, in whose honor she chose her stage name, and ballerina Militsa Envald — Marina Vlady became the most famous of four sisters who were all actresses. The sisters once appeared onstage together in Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.” Her “Russian” films include André Michel’s romantic “The Blonde Witch” (1956), based on Kuprin’s novella “Olesya” but set in Sweden; Georges Lampin’s French “Crime and Punishment” (1956), also starring Hossein, in which Vlady’s character Lili is modeled on Sonya from Dostoevsky’s novel; and Alberto Lattuada’s Chekhov adaptation “The Steppe” (1962), in which she played Countess Dranitskaya. And, of course, there is Sergei Yutkevich’s “A Plot for a Short Story” (1969), recognized at Venice, in which she portrayed Lika Mizinova, the model for Nina Zarechnaya.

Marina Vlady’s “mermaid-like” beauty, as people liked to call it — and many of her roles did involve water — captivated one generation after another, always suggesting something otherworldly. To Europeans, she was an inscrutable Russian; to Soviet and Russian audiences, an intriguing Frenchwoman. That duality helped her remain, until her death, both an actress and the heroine — even the creator — of a sweeping real-life love story.