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Vlady was born in Clichy, Hauts-de-SeinetoWhite Russian immigrant parents. Her father was an opera singer and her mother was a dancer. Her sisters, now all deceased, were the actresses Odile Versois, Hélène Vallier and Olga Baïdar-Poliakoff. The sisters began acting as children and, for a while, pursued a ballet career.
From 1955 to 1959, she was married to actor/director Robert Hossein. From 1963 to 1966, she was married to Jean-Claude Brouillet, a French entrepreneur, owner of two airlines and member of French Resistance. Vlady was married to Soviet poet/songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky from 1969 until his death in 1980.[1] She lived with French oncologist Léon Schwartzenberg from the 1980s until his death in 2003.[citation needed]
She wrote Vladimir, or the Aborted Flight, a memoir of her relationship with Vladimir Vysotsky.
For a decade, the couple maintained a long-distance relationship as Vlady compromised her career in France in order to spend more time in Moscow, and his friends pulled strings for him to travel abroad. She eventually joined the Communist Party of France, which essentially gave her an unlimited-entry visa into the Soviet Union, and provided Vysotsky with some immunity against prosecution by the government. The problems of his long-distance relationship with Vlady inspired several of Vysotsky's songs.[citation needed]
In 1971, Vlady signed the Manifesto of the 343, which publicly declared she had an abortion as a way to advocate for reproductive rights, even though the procedure was illegal in France at the time.[5]
Vlady and partner Léon Schwartzenberg participated in the protests against deportations of Arab workers from France.[6] She accepted a role in a film about a gay couple from Iran.[7]
