After four short marriages that all ended in divorce, Desni finally found happiness with builder Albert Lavagna. This marriage lasted over half a century. Initially, she did not wish to marry him, (given her track record), but he insisted due to his strong religious faith as she was pregnant. It was his first marriage.
Daughter of actress Xenia Desni.
Ex-stepmother of Simone Lovell.
Her first husband, Hans Wilhelm, was a German dentist. They married while she was a teenager but divorced before she moved to England in 1931. Her third husband, Roland Gillett, a film producer, served in WWII as a naval flyer but the strains of that ended the marriage.
Mother of two daughters with her fifth husband Albert Lavagna.
Of Russian parentage.
On her move to the South of France in the early 1950s, she became romantically involved with Albert Lavagna, a builder, and she developed an inn with a restaurant and bar called L'Auberge Chez Tamara, which became a great attraction around Grasse in the Alpes Maritimes.
Took her mother's surname as her stage-name. Her father, James Brodsky, left his family to settle in the United States.