Galina Belyayeva

Biography

Galina 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 construction site for a meagre monthly salary of 100 rubles. An avid dancer, at 13 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 striking performance next to Oleg Yankovsky, made her an overnight sensation and earned her an epithed 'our Russian Audrey Hepburn' from the Soviet critics. Yankovsky admitted later that it was Galina's charming presence that imparted the film its unique, haunting atmosphere. During the shooting Belyaeva became romantically involved with 40-year-old Loteanu, who two years later married the 18-year-old actress.

In 1979 Belyayeva enrolled into the Shchukin Theatre Institute in Moscow. After the graduation in 1983 she joined the Mayakovsky Theatre troupe 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 sparkling performance in the musical melodrama Ah, Vaudeville (1979) the actress was lauded as one of the brightest hopes of the Soviet film industry.

Bearing in mind that his young wife had to sacrifice her career in ballet for films, Loteanu in 1983 filmed her 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. The film came under heavy criticism from the Soviet ballet pundits, particularly those practicing at the Bolshoi Theatre, who were outraged with the director's failure to approach them as consultants. But it was met with immense 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 director Vitaly Tarasenko’s They Danced The Winter Through (2004).

Private life

In 1979 Galina Belyayeva married film director Emil Loteanu. Their marriage was a stormy one and lasted five years. Later Belyaeva spoke with great admiration and respect of her first husband, giving him credit for being her first serious tutor who in many ways shaped her as an actress. Their son, Emil Emilyevich Loteanu, was born in 1980. A Moscow University graduate, he studied music in the USA and, as of 2013, lived in Los Angeles. He has a daughter, Masha and a son Christian.

Belyayeva's second son's father is the surgeon Levon Sakvarelidze, her partner in the mid-1980s. Platon (born 1985), a Moscow University's Law faculty graduate, appeared in two films his early years, Bembi's Childhood, Детство Бемби, 1985) and Lermontov (1986, as an infant poet). He studied at the Moscow University Law faculty and then Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, to become an independent film producer.

In 1989 Galina Belyayeva married the businessman and publisher Sergey Doychenko (b. 1966). They have two children, Anna (b. 1993) and Markel (b. 1999).