- At the age of 11 she visited a theatre and became obsessed with it. One of her stepsisters, then a student at the Saint Petersburg medical university, was offered to play a small part in Konstantin Stanislavski's play. She brought Serafima a signed photo of him and suggested to enter the Moscow Art Theatre.
- Serafima Birman was a Soviet and Russian actress, theatre director and writer.
- In 1969 Birman's husband Alexander Talanov, a Russian writer and journalist, died of illness aged 68. Serafima took his death hard. She soon became mentally ill and left the theatre. She was taken by her relatives to Leningrad where she went through treatment in mental hospitals until her death in 1976.
- She People's Artist of the RSFSR (1946).
- While biographers usually state the couple was childless, according to the actor Stanislav Sadalsky Birman actually left some descendants.
- Her unusual appearance and expressive acting attracted comedy directors: between 1956 and 1957 she played two memorable grotesque characters in Andrey Tutishkin's Crazy Day and Alexander Stolbov's An Ordinary Man.
- She was an actress of the Moscow Art Theatre who worked in the First Studio and Second Moscow Art Theatre throughout the revolutionary and civil war period (1910s-1920s) and went on to have a distinguished career as a performer, teacher, and director in Stalinist and post-Stalinist USSR (1920s-1970s).
- Her father German Mikhailovich Birman was a Stabs-kapitan who served in the 51st reserve infantry battalion of the Imperial Russian Army. He came from raznochintsy, but was granted personal nobility after making a successful military career. He resigned rather early and died in 1908. Serafima described him as a "lonely, unsociable man... who had little success at finishing things, like the Moldovan-Russian dictionary he was writing for years".
- From 1913 on she also performed at the First Studio led by Stanislavski.
- Her mother Elena Ivanovna Birman (née Botezat) "was a complete opposite of her father". She came from a wealthy Moldovan family, studied in a finishing school and married as a teenager. At the time German Mikhailovich Birman met and married her, she was already a 19-year-old widow with two daughters. Serafima also had a younger brother, Nikolai.
- She also voiced some animated films.
- She played her first big role of Ortensia in the 1914 adaptation of The Mistress of the Inn play.
- Her biggest success came with Ivan the Terrible directed by Sergei Eisenstein in 1944 during the war. Birman played the main antagonist - Evfrosinia Staritskaia, mother of Vladimir of Staritsa - who wanted to see him as a new Russian Tsar and led the plot against Ivan the Terrible. Eisenstein first planned Faina Ranevskaya for this part, but she was rejected by censors supposedly because of her "openly Semitic features". Either way, Birman's character has been widely praised since.
- Birman's first roles in cinema date back to 1918: she played a small part in "But He, Rebellious, Seeks for Tempest..." a crime drama, and Lady Sophia Entwistle in "the Buried Alive adaptation" of Arnold Bennett's satirical book. Both films were directed by Alexandre Volkoff shortly before his emigration and are considered to be lost today.
- In 1946 the second part The Boyars' Plot ( Ivan the Terrible. Part II: The Boyars' Plot) was finished where she reprised the role of Evfrosinia, although the film was met with harsh criticism and banned for 12 years.
- In 1924 the First Studio was turned into the Moscow Art Theatre II by its actors led by Michael Chekhov. Same year Birman debuted as a theatre director with Love - A Golden Book, an adaptation of Aleksey Tolstoy's play. After a number of internal conflicts the theatre was finally closed in 1936.
- As one of her close friends Rostislav Plyatt wrote in his memoirs, "She tried to stage The Blue Bird with her ward neighbors, hasting to demonstrate the work to her beloved Stanislavski! Irrepressible, she even died Birman-style - no day without theatre!..
- She also published articles and several non-fiction books dedicated to her profession and Russian theatre in general: Actor and Character (1934), Actor's Labour (1939), The Path of an Actress (1959 and 1962), Meetings Granted by Fate (1971).
- In 1911 Birman graduated from the courses and became an actress of the Moscow Art Theatre with the help of Vasily Kachalov, one of her teachers who sent a recommendation letter straight to Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko.
- She was the first female director at the theatre, continued to act and direct in Soviet theatres, and worked in film, notably with Eisenstein on Ivan the Terrible. The development of her career required great determination and necessitated making theatrical and political choices in order to survive and maintain the artistic principles on which her work was based.
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