Escape to Love: How Soviet Handsome Oleg Vidov Met His American Wife

The personal life of Oleg Vidov resembles an exciting novel, where there was a place for action-packed twists.

The majestic blonde was married four times, and gossips are sure that most of them were calculated. The most “modest” choice of the actor was the first wife – a girl named Marina, who worked as a graphic designer. Family life, however, did not work out – being in her husband’s shadow, she was jealous of her handsome husband.

After that, Vidov fell in love with a girl from high society – a friend of Galina Brezhneva, Natalia Fedotova. Rumor has it that the actor was looking for proximity to influential circles, but Vidov’s acquaintances were sure of this: he fell in love very sincerely and simply lost his mind. Looking at Natalia, it is easy to believe that this woman was a real beauty. The marriage lasted six years, and a son, Vyacheslav, was born there.

In the early 1980s, Vidov was already planning to emigrate. In 1983 he married a Yugoslav citizen, Veritsa Jovanovich, and went to see her legally. However, a year later he received a call to Moscow. Vidov realized they wouldn’t let him back and started to act. He managed to obtain an Austrian visa, from there he left temporarily for Italy, where he hoped to receive permission to enter the United States.

In Rome, Oleg Vidov stayed with actor Richard Harrison and his wife Francesca. This is where the fateful meeting with his fourth and last wife, the American journalist Joan Borsten, took place in 1985. She then worked as a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and wrote a series in Italy on local cinema. That day she returned to Rome from a trip to Cairo and stopped to visit her friends.

The Soviet actor who visited them did not impress him at first.

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But Vidov Joan, it seems, immediately liked it. The journalist recalled that he had started following her “like a puppy”. He constantly told a new acquaintance how difficult it was for him in the USSR, that escape was the only way out, and finally melted the heart of an American woman. However, before that, Borsten managed to confuse the actor with a Soviet spy. I saw an article in an Italian newspaper that Interpol was looking for a certain Oleg Bitov – and I thought it was his new acquaintance, and the Italians just made a mistake in spelling the name. But Harrison dispelled all his fears, assuring that Vidov is a genuine actor and star of Soviet cinema.

It is curious that in the end it was Vidov who went to the United States first, and that Joan always stayed in Italy to work. The man constantly called him and told him how bored and waiting he was. As soon as Borsten returned to the United States, Vidov immediately admitted that he wanted to live with her all his life.

In 1989, they formalized their relationship, and remained together until the death of the actor in 2017.

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