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Valery Cheplanova was born Veronika Valeryevna Cheplanova in 1980 in the Soviet Russian city of Kazan and grew up in the countryside with her great-grandmother. She later adopted the first name of her father, who died at an early age. Together with her mother, she then moved to Germany, where she began her artistic training: At the age of 17 she learned dance at the Palucca School in Dresden. From 1999 she first studied puppetry at the Ernst Busch Academy in Berlin, then changed to acting. She graduated in 2005. In 2006 she became a permanent member of the ensemble of the Deutsches Theater Berlin, where she appeared in stage productions directed by Dimiter Gotscheff and Jürgen Gosch, among others. Later, Cheplanova also appeared at the Residenztheater in Munich and the Schauspiel Frankfurt. From the very beginning, she also played male roles such as Goethe's Tasso and Schiller's Franz Mohr.
In 2008, she made her big screen debut with a small role in the Wachowskis' "Speed Racer", and made a name for herself on television around the same time with the series "Doktor Martin". Over the years, she continued acting in front of the camera as well as on stage. She appeared in television series and serials such as "Tatort", "Der Zürich-Krimi" and Dominik Graf's "Im Angesicht des Verbrechens" ("In the Face of Crime"), but also starring in feature films, such as for Andreas Dresen in "Whisky mit Vodka" (2008) alongside Henry Hübchen and in Jan Schomburg's "Über uns das All" ("Above Us Only Sky", 2011). In 2017, Cheplanova first appeared on screen in a Russian-language lead role in the award-winning Greek-Bulgarian-French co-production "O gios tis sofia" ("Son of Sofia") as the mother of 11-year-old protagonist Misha.
Cheplanova has been taking on film and television roles regularly since 2019. In 2021, she starred alongside Tobias Moretti in the thriller "Das Haus" ("The House"), as a married couple that finds itself trapped in their isolated high-tech vacation home, and in the postwar drama "Trümmermädchen - Die Geschichte der Charlotte Schuhmann" ("Germany Year Zero") as an actress and leader of a "Fräulein Course" in which she teaches young women how to strive for emancipation. In Mareike Wegener's feature film debut "Echo", (2022) she took on the lead role of traumatized inspector and Afghanistan veteran Saskia Harder, who investigates a mysterious murder case in the German province.
In addition to her acting career, Cheplanova is also active as a singer - in particular as a Fassbinder interpreter - and as a narrator for radio plays and audio books. For her achievments in that area as well as for her performances she has received a number of awards, among them the Alfred Kerr Performers' Award in 2014, the Bavarian Arts Promotion Award in 2015, and then the Berlin Arts Award from the Academy of the Arts in 2017. For her stage performance in Frank Castorf's "Faust" production, she was named Actress of the Year in the same year. In 2018 she won the German Audiobook Award in the category "Best Interpreter" for Paulus Hochgatterer's "Der Tag, an dem mein Großvater ein Held war".