Biography
Yuliya Solntseva was a Soviet actress and film director. Born in Moscow in 1901, she began her career as an actress in the 1920s, appearing in films including Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924) and as Opanas's daughter in Earth (1930). She was also assistant director on the latter.
She married director Aleksandr Dovzhenko in 1929 and collaborated with him on several films, including as co-director or assistant on works such as Michurin (1949), for which she received a Stalin Prize. After his death in 1956, she completed a number of his projects as director, among them Poem of the Sea (1958), Chronicle of Flaming Years (1961) and The Enchanted Desna (1964). For Chronicle of Flaming Years she won the Best Director prize at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival, the first woman to receive the award. She directed fourteen films between 1939 and 1979 and was named a People's Artist of the USSR.
