Galina Belyaeva

Galina Viktorovna Belyaeva (Russian: Галина Викторовна Беляева; born 26 April 1961) is a Soviet and Russian film and theatre actress, best known for her leading roles in A Hunting Accident (1977) and Anna Pavlova (1983). Belyaeva, the Meritorious Artist of Russia (2003), has been one of the leading actresses at the Moscow Mayakovsky Theatre since 1983. Belyaeva was born in Irkutsk and spent her childhood years in Nevinnomyssk, Northern Caucasus, raised with her younger sister by a single mother, who worked at a local construction site. At age thirteen, she went to Voronezh to study classical ballet at the Choreography College. It was there that she was spotted by the assistant of film director Emil Loteanu, who was at the time looking for a teenage actress for the role of Olya Skvortsova in A Hunting Accident. Belyayeva's performance next to Oleg Yankovsky earned her critical acclaim and an epithet 'Russian Audrey Hepburn'. Yankovsky stated later that it was her presence that imparted the film its unique, haunting atmosphere. During the shooting, Belyaeva became romantically involved with Loteanu, who two years later married the 18-year-old actress.In 1979, Belyayeva enrolled into the Shchukin Theatre Institute in Moscow. After her graduation in 1983, she joined Mayakovsky Theatre and made her debut there as Vika in Tomorrow There Was War, after Boris Vasilyev's novel. While a Shchukin Institute student, Belyaeva appeared in several films. After her performance as Vera Lisichkina in Ah, Vaudeville, Vaudeville (1979), she was lauded as one of the brightest hopes of the Soviet film industry.In 1983, Loteanu filmed his wife in the biopic Anna Pavlova, where Belyayeva, playing the great ballerina, had also to perform most of her stage numbers. "We've done a lot of home work. Contacted the Anna Pavlova Society in London (where she lived in emigration) and received from them invaluable help. For days on end I was studying footages of her stage performances, practiced in Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theatre with finest ballet instructors," the actress remembered later. Despite some criticism, from the Bolshoi Theatre headquarters mostly, the film was met with popular acclaim and confirmed Belyaeva's status as a Soviet film star. Also highly successful were her performances in the lyrical comedy Her Romantic Hero (1984), film-operetta Pericola (1984) and The Black Arrow (1985), after Robert Louis Stevenson's novel.In the post-Perestroika years, Belyayeva continued to work in the theatre but mostly ignored the approaches from the film directors. Her most notable role in film in the recent times was that of Valeria, the dance teacher, in Vitaly Tarasenko's They Danced Just One Winter (2004).