Biography

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.

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.

While biographers usually state the couple was childless, according to the actor Stanislav Sadalsky Birman actually left some descendants.

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".