Not a sex symbol, but Baba Yaga: Soviet beauties who played old women and kikimor

In the cinema, the actress got character roles, and often these were not the most positive characters – Frost’s stepmother, Marya the Artisan’s Auntie Bad Weather. Fairy tale characters in general in the late 1950s and 1960s became the iconic images of the actress. For example, she played a kikimora in the movie Golden Horns. Well, one of the most colorful roles of the actress was the image of the daughter of Baba Yaga in the film “Fire, Water and … Copper Pipes”.

The actress was not afraid of on-screen transformations. She could play countesses, prostitutes and even men – she just had such a fun role in Bergamo’s film Truffaldino, where she played Beatrice, who, disguised as her late brother, tries to find her lover.

There were also fairy-tale characters in Kosobutskaya’s filmography – in the film “New Year’s Adventures of Masha and Vitya” she played the provocative Baba Yaga. And it is not so easy to recognize a beautiful, elegant actress in this character at first glance – here it is, acting talent.

Moviegoers remembered Tenyakova in the image of a simple wrinkled villager Shura from the movie “Love and Pigeons”, but in fact the actress looked completely different in real life! Alas, the audience had almost nothing to compare. The role in Vladimir Menchov’s film turned out to be the most stellar – Tenyakova did not act so much in the cinema, but she became a star of the theatrical stage, having worked in the BDT, from where she left defiantly when her husband, Sergei Yursky, was fired and at the Moscow Art Theater. Chekhov, and at the Mossovet Theater.

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