Valentina Serova

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Valentina Serova (Russian: Валентина Васильевна Серова) (December 23, 1917 - December 12, 1975) was a Soviet film and theater actress.

[edit] Life

Serova was born Valentina Polovikova (Валентина Половикова) in 1917 in Kharkov. In 1938, she married to her first husband, Anatoli Serov, a Soviet Air Force general, a test and figter pilot. In 1939 Anatoli Serov died in a crash testing a new plane. Same year, her film "Devushka s harakterom" had a huge success and she became one of the biggest film stars of the Soviet Union. In 1940 she met Konstantin Simonov, a famous Soviet author, to whom she married in 1943. Simonov's poem "Wait for me", one of the most famous Russian war poems, is dedicated to her. Their relationship has been a troubled one; her 1942-1946 affair with marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky was widely known. Simonov left her in 1957. Her career was in decline after 1940s. She died in Moscow in 1975.