Valentina Serova

Valentina Serova (Russian: Валенти́на Васи́льевна Серо́ва) (December 23, 1917 – December 12, 1975) was a Soviet film and theatre actress of Ukrainian origin. Honored Artist of the RSFSR (1946). Winner of the Stalin Prize of the second degree (1947).

Serova was born Valentina Polovikova (Валентина Половикова) in 1917 in Kharkiv. In 1938, she married her first husband, Anatoli Serov, a Soviet Air Force general, a test and fighter pilot. In 1939 Anatoli Serov died in a crash testing a new plane. In the same year, her film A Girl with a Temper 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, whom she married in 1943. Simonov's poem "Wait For Me", one of the most famous Russian war poems, is dedicated to her. She subsequently inspired a series of love poems, collected as "With You and Without You" ("С тобой и без тебя"). Their relationship was a troubled one. During the war it was widely rumored that Serova was a mistress of Gen. K.K. Rokossovski. While it's true that Serova, working as a hospital volunteer, met Rokossovski several times while he was recovering from a wound from a shell fragment in early 1942, there is no evidence that they were lovers. Rokossovski already had a mistress at this time, Dr. Lt. Galina Talanova, with whom he had a daughter in 1945.

Her career declined after the 1940s. Simonov left her in 1957. She became an alcoholic and died in Moscow in 1975.

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