Tatyana Mikhailovna (Moiseyevna) Lioznova was born on 20 July, 1924 in Moscow. Her father, an engineer and economist, volunteered to the army in the very beginning of the war and was killed in the same horrible year of 1941. Her mother, a representative of intelligentsia in the highest sense of the word, with whom Tatyana lived all her life, undoubtedly, had a great impact on her daughter and her creative interests. After school Tanya entered the Moscow Aviation Institute but soon left it. In the thick of the war, in 1945, she entered VGIK (The All-Russian State Institute for Cinematography) but after a trial semester was sent down. Her teachers decided her life experience was not rich enough for such an all-embracing profession as film-director. But Tanya did not give in: she stepped in the doorway of the institute in the way of her teachers and begged them into watching her study films…
