Stela Popescu was born into a family of teachers in the village of Slobozia-Hodorogea, Orhei. Her first memory was the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia. In 1940, her father was deported to Siberia and she didn't know what happened with him for 19 years. In 1944, when the Red Army reoccupied Bessarabia, after it had been liberated by the Romanian Army in 1941, her mother fled with her daughter to Brașov in the still free Romania. In 1953, she passed the college entrance examination and was assigned to the "Maxim Gorki" Russian Language School. She abandoned the course after a year and a half when she joined the Theater of the Ministry of the Interior. In 1956, she was admitted to the Institute of Theater and Cinematography, while continuing to perform in theater.