Tamara Makarova

Born July 31 (Aug. 13), 1907, in St. Petersburg. Soviet Russian actress. People’s Artist of the USSR (1950). Became a member of the CPSU in 1943.

Makarova completed her training at the Leningrad Institute of Stage Arts in 1930. Her first film roles were the typist Dudkina in Someone Else’s Jacket (1927) and Greta in Deserter (1933). Beginning in 1934, with her role as Natal’ia in the film Do I Love You, her career was linked with the work of the director S. A. Gerasimov. Makarova played the roles of Zhenia Okhrimenko in The Courageous Seven (1936), Natasha in Komsomo’sk (1938), Agrafena in The Teacher (1939), Anna Sviridova in The Home Front (1944), Elena Koshevaia in The Young Guard (1948), Anna Andreevna in Men and Beasts (1962), Panina in The Journalist (1967), and the architect Petrushkovaia in To Love a Man (1972). In these films she created truly Russian characters, distinguished by gentle femininity, naturalness, sincere warmth, and inner sensitivity.

During and after the Great Patriotic War, Makarova portrayed women who had endured the ordeal of war and, in the process, had become stronger and wiser. In 1941 she played the role of Nina in the film Masquerade (adaptation of M. Iu. Lermontov’s play). Makarova has also been in films that were not directed by Gerasimov; for example, she portrayed the Mistress of the Copper Mountain in The Stone Flower (1946) and Ekaterina Ivanovna in Memory of the Heart (1958). In 1944, Makarova became a teacher at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, receiving a professorship there in 1968. She has been awarded the State Prize of the USSR (1941, 1947), two orders, and various medals.