Tatyana Doronina

Tatiana (Tatyana) Vasilyevna Doronina (Russian: Татьяна Васильевна Доронина; born 12 September 1933) is a popular Soviet/Russian actress who has performed in movies and the theater. She is generally regarded as one of the most talented actresses of her generation and was named a People's Artist of the USSR in 1981. Doronina was born in Leningrad, USSR (now present-day St. Petersburg Russia) After graduating the MKhAT school in Moscow, she returned to Leningrad and joined the Bolshoi Drama Theatre directed by Georgy Tovstonogov.

After moving to Moscow, Doronina worked at the Mayakovsky Theater and then at MKhAT. Her major roles were Arkadina in The Seagull by Chekhov, Dulcinea del Toboso in a play by Alexander Volodin, Queen Elizabeth of England and Mary Stuart in Vivat Regina.

The films she starred in, though few, are now considered Soviet classics. Many directors at the time believed she was too theatrical for film and refused to hire her. Georgy Natanson reversed that judgment by giving her the lead parts in Older Sister and Once More About Love. Both films had a significant success and made Doronina a noteworthy film star. Young women in the Soviet Union imitated her bouffant hair-do and her manner of speaking, and fans queued up for hours to get tickets. For her role for Once More about Love in which she played a flight attendant, she earned the Best Soviet Actress title in 1968 from the Soviet Screen. "Doronina's profoundly romantic heroines could sacrifice everything for love. She rendered the love theme the way no actress did. In almost every of her films she would sing a song, which in her presentation turned into a small drama", says Russian Cultural Navigator. In Three Poplars in Plyushcikha she plays a plain country woman who, although married, has never experienced love and puts the anguish tormenting her heart into a song called "Tenderness”.

At present Doronina is artistic director of the Gorky MKhAT, a job she accepted when MKhAT split into two independent troupes.

Her former husbands include Edvard Radzinsky, a popular Russian writer and historian, and actors Oleg Basilashvili and Boris Khimichev.