Lyudmila Chursina was born July 20, 1941 in Stalinabad, now Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. As a young woman, she did not dream of becoming an actress and wanted to enroll in a technical college or university. \nChursina accompanied a friend to Moscow and managed to pass the exams at three dramatic arts colleges: the Lunacharsky State Institute for Theater Arts (now the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts (GITIS)), the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, and the Boris Shchukin Theater Institute. She chose to study at the last of these three. Upon graduation, Chursina worked at the Vakhtangov Theater for three years. \nChursina’s screen debut came in 1961, when she played a supporting role in the film When the Trees Were Tall. She also performed several small parts in other movies. Her first major on-screen role was “Darya” in the film The Don Story (1965). Chursina starred in the film while still graduating from the institute. She eventually married Vladimir Fetin, the film’s director, and went to live with him in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. There, Chursina worked at the Pushkin Drama Theater. \nOver the course of her career, she starred in more than 50 feature films, including Virineya (1968), The Little Crane (1968), Olesya (1970), The Countess (1991), as well as television productions such as The Ugryum River (1968), The Long Road in the Dunes (1981), The Case of Sukhovo-Kobylin (1991), and Goryachev and Others (1994).\nShe received an award at the 1969 San Sebastian International Film Festival for her role in The Little Crane. Chursina became People’s Artist of the USSR in 1981. In 1984, she joined the Moscow-based Soviet Army Theater and performed brilliantly as Nastasya Filippovna in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Chursina also starred in a number of TV productions. In 2000, she received the Order “For Service to the Fatherland” Fourth Class.\n
