Yuliya Solntseva

Yuliya Ippolitovna Solntseva (; born Yuliya Ippolitovna Peresvetova, 7 August 1901 – 28 October 1989) was a Soviet actress and film director. As an actress, she is known for starring in the silent sci-fi classic Aelita (1924). She is the first female winner of the Best Director Award at Cannes film festival in the 20th century and the first woman to win a directing prize at any of the major European film festivals, for the film Chronicle of Flaming Years (1961), a war drama about Soviet resistance to Nazi occupation in 1941. Biography She was born on July 25 (or August 7) 1901 in Moscow in the family of Ippolit Peresvetov and Valentina Timokhina. Her mother worked as a senior cashier at the Muir and Maryliz Trading House (now TsUM). Yuliya and her brother were left without parents early in the care of their grandfather and grandmother. After moving to St. Petersburg, where her grandfather was transferred, she studied at the gymnasium. Here she became interested in theater, played in an amateur studio. She studied at the Faculty of History and Philology of Moscow University, but left her studies and entered acting courses at the State Institute of Musical Drama (now GITIS)..