Soviet and Russian actress Alla Demidova, who turns 90 today, built a career on firsts. One of them was speaking the word ‘erection’ on a Russian stage.

Alla Demidova turned 90 on September 29. An actress, writer, and scholar of Russia’s Silver Age, she has always worked in film and theater with top-tier directors from Russia and abroad, including Andrei Tarkovsky, Kira Muratova, Yuri Lyubimov, Anatoly Efros, Roman Viktyuk, Kirill Serebrennikov, Giorgio Strehler, and Theodoros Terzopoulos. She has also brought new, sometimes radical writing to the stage, pursued literary research, and founded one of the Soviet Union’s first independent theaters. In an article for the independent journalists’ cooperative Bereg, theater critic Alla Shenderova ex