Margarita Barskaya played her first role in the theater at the age of six.
In 1922, she graduated from the "Russian Department" of the Azerbaijan National Theater.
She quickly took a leading position in the "Kranyy Fakel" theater under the leadership of Tatishchev.
In 1923-1929 she was an actress at the Odessa State Theater. She also played several roles in films.
In Odessa, Margarita Barskaya met her future husband - director and actor Pyotr Chardynin.
The vocation of Margarita Barskaya was the cinema for children. In 1925, during the shooting of the movie "Taras Shevchenko", at her suggestion, a special children's version was made.
Margarita Barskaya is best known as a screenwriter and director of one of the best children's films "Torn shoes". The screenplay for this film was written in 1931, but filming was not completed until the end of 1933.
In 1936, Margarita Barskaya completed the shooting of the film "Father and Son", but the work was stopped. There were at least two good reasons for this. First, the action of the film took place in the alleys and slums of Moscow. In addition, the film in acute form addressed the problem of the education of children in a Soviet family and school. It was a film considered ideologically false. Second, his friend Karl Radek, whom Barskaya met while filming "Pierced Shoes", was arrested as an "enemy of the people".
In 1937, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of October, Barskaya planned to publish two short stories, forming a sort of contrasting diptych. The first story tells about the life of a child from a working-class family before the revolution. The second concerns the joyful life of modern children.
She also had more distant projects, just as closely related to Soyuzdetfilm. Barskaya worked on a literary screenplay based on the novel "The Prince and the Poor" by Mark Twain. I was thinking of a movie about Pavlik Morozov. She dreamed of a little movie for preschoolers, the characters of which had to be ... animals.
His untimely death prevented the implementation of these plans and many others.
She committed suicide by jumping out of a window on July 23, 1939.