French singer and actress Marina Vlady, the last wife of Vladimir Vysotsky, has died at the age of 88.

"French-Russian actress, singer, and writer Marina Vlady died this Thursday, September 24. She was 88 years old," RIA Novosti reports, citing the TV channel BFMTV.

Vlady was born into a family of Russian émigrés in the commune of Clichy, near Paris, on May 10, 1938. She landed her first role at the age of 10 in Jean Guéret’s film “Summer Stor” (1949). Success came after the film “Before the Deluge” (1954). In 1963, she won the Cannes Film Festival award for Best Actress for her role in “The Conjugal Bed” (originally titled “Una storia moderna: l'ape regina”). Over the course of her career, the actress played more than a hundred roles in film, theater, and television.

The defining chapter of her life story was her romance with Vladimir Vysotsky. They met in 1967, when Vlady arrived in the USSR for the V Moscow International Film Festival. Vysotsky had seen her even earlier—on screen in the film “The Sorceress”—and reportedly declared to his friends right then and there that he would marry her. After the performance of “Pugachev” at the Taganka Theatre, he approached her and said, "I have finally met you. I would like to leave this place and sing only for you." Thus began one of the most remarkable and complex love stories of the Soviet era.

Their relationship developed at a distance: Vysotsky was rarely able to travel abroad, while Vlady constantly sought ways to come to Moscow. To simplify visa procedures, she even joined the French Communist Party. In December 1970, they officially registered their marriage in Moscow. For Vysotsky, this was his third and final marriage; for Vlady, it was her third. Their union lasted until the poet's death on July 25, 1980.

Vysotsky dedicated some of his most tender songs and poems to Vlady. Among them are "To go into the hut and start singing..." (with a direct dedication to "Marina"), the lyrical "Here the spruce boughs tremble in mid-air...", the poem "I love you now...", and the lines: "I would compare no other woman to you— / Even were I to be executed or shot. / Look how I gaze at you in adoration, / Like a Raphael Madonna."

Many other love songs from the late 1960s and 1970s were also inspired by his feelings for her. In 1974, the couple recorded an album of Vysotsky’s songs together at the Melodiya studio (it was not released until 1987). They also starred in the French-Hungarian drama “Just Like Home” (1977), directed by Márta Mészáros.

After Vysotsky’s death, Vlady published a book of memoirs titled “Vladimir, or the Interrupted Flight”. She donated the poet’s manuscripts and her personal correspondence with him to the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and the Vysotsky Museum in Yekaterinburg, stipulating that the materials could be made public only after her death.

Vlady was married four times. Her last partner was the renowned French oncologist Léon Schwartzenberg, who passed away in 2003.