What happened to the most underrated participants of the “Star Factory”: Balakireva, Buzhilova, Kaufman, Rzhevskaya

Yulia Buzhilova took part in the very first “Star Factory”. She came to the project at the invitation of Igor Matvienko, who already knew Yulia as a songwriter. Buzhilova immediately began to stand out from the background of other participants. She was closed and mysterious, wrote unformatted songs, boycotted dance classes, as if she was not going to become a bright pop star. Her main hit on the project was the song “Sleep”.

She did not reach the final, but Matvienko, contrary to the rules, rewarded the talented participant – on the air he announced that he was giving Buzhilova a certificate for 1 million rubles to record an album and shoot a video. As Yulia said later, she never saw the money. No one was in a hurry to unroll it either. In 2003, the artist recorded an unexpected duet with Renata Litvinova, but after that she again disappeared from the screens.

“I didn’t really feel like going to clubs and saying, ‘Well, take me. I’d rather stay home, not eat or drink anything, than ask for it,” Yulia said in one of her rare interviews.

At the invitation of Matvienko, she wrote several songs for the participants of the fifth factory, then began to work as a vocal teacher at the Matvienko MAMA Music Academy. Buzhilova categorically refuses photo shoots and interviews, devoting herself entirely to her students. Almost nothing is known about her personal life, except that in 2006 Yulia Buzhilova gave birth to a daughter, Alexandra.

When Sasha Balakireva appeared at Star Factory – 5, it looked like she would go far. The mechanical red-haired girl immediately grabbed all the attention and looked very organic on stage. But everything turned out differently.

Although Sasha became the runner-up for the project, her popularity began to decline. She tried to revive her stage career in the KuBa group with Anna Kulikova, but the team broke up a few years later, and even after participating in the Main Stage project in 2015, there was no of breakthrough.

Then Balakireva entered GITIS and began to work in musical theater. She no longer has any ambition to conquer the pop scene, now the girl is interested in “higher” genres. Sasha continues to record songs and occasionally performs in Moscow. We can follow the life of the ex-manufacturer on her social networks, but there, she talks more about her work than her personal life. A few years ago Balakireva admitted that she does not have a boyfriend.

Elena Kaufman was also at the fifth “Star Factory”, led by Alla Pugacheva, but unlike Balakireva, she did not last long in the project. Nevertheless, the singer managed to remember the audience for her author’s songs, romantic voice and decadent image. Kaufman came to the show as an almost ready-made artist – she was a member of the group Mission: Anticyclone. Like Buzhilova, Kaufman seemed unformatted for a pop project: she listened to Bjork, Radiohead and Portishead and composed songs on guitar. The most famous was his song “I’m off the ground”.

Despite an early start to the project, Kaufman first rose to prominence in show business. While others were still participating in “factory” competitions, she already had her first solo album in her hands. The press also considered Elena a great artist. “Compared to Kaufman, the whole Star Factory looks like a provincial kaveen,” they wrote then.

But now there is very little information about Elena. We only know that she is married and has a child.

Maria Rzhevskaya is one of the brightest participants of Star Factory 2, of which Maxim Fadeev was the producer. His song “When I Become a Cat” then became a smash hit, and today many can easily sing along to it.

According to the results of the project, Rzhevskaya took fifth place, but after the final Fadeev promoted her more actively than the winner Polina Gagarina. But after the tour, Maria suddenly disappeared from show business, having managed to release only two new songs. Instead of a career, Rzhevskaya focused on family life. She married the general director of the ARS company Vyacheslav Kormiltsev, gave birth to a daughter, and then emigrated with her husband to the UK. There, Rzhevskaya received acting education and took the pseudonym Masha Kaya. She participated in theatrical productions and gave concerts in small nightclubs. In recent years, Rzhevskaya has also taken up design.