FilmObituary

Oleg Yankovsky

Acclaimed Russian actor best known in the west for his work with Andrei Tarkovsky

Superb Russian actor little known in the west but revered in his native country

Less than a week ago, the actor Oleg Yankovsky was being highly praised for his dignified and spiritual performance of the Metropolitan Philip, the only adversary of Ivan the Terrible, in the film Tsar, directed by Pavel Lungin, showing in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival. It was Yankovsky's last role before dying of cancer aged 65.

Those in the west who knew Yankovsky only from a handful of films, principally two of Andrei Tarkovsky's most haunting and poetic works, The Mirror (1975) and Nostalgia (1983), could have little idea how much he was revered in his own country, in both Soviet and post-Soviet times, equally on stage and in films.

He was born into a family of Polish origin in a village in Kazakhstan, where his father, a former tsarist army officer who joined the Red Army, was exiled and later died in a Gulag labour camp during Josef Stalin's crackdown on Trotskyites in the military. "I remembered my father's arrest… I saw it with my own eyes," he told Pravda a few months ago. 

After Stalin's death in 1953, the family settled in Saratov, in southern Russia, where Yankovsky went to drama school, graduating in 1965. A year later, aged 22, he appeared in his first film, A Ballad of Love (1966), and immediately impressed with his aristocratic bearing and handsome features.

But it was his next two films that launched his film career, The Shield and the Sword (1968), in which he played an arrogant German officer, and Two Comrades Were Serving (1968). In the latter, Yankovsky played a student who joins the Red Army during the civil war, fighting for the revolution not only with his gun, but with his camera. The performance demonstrated Yankovsky's skill in playing heroic roles with a certain irony, without resorting to the larger-than-life mannerisms in Soviet cinema of the 1950s. However, despite the "Thaw" period following Khrushchev's famous speech in 1956 attacking Stalin's "cult of personality", a new era of repression had set in by the time Yankovsky made his screen debut.

Despite the mediocrity of the films he appeared in during the stagnant Brezhnev years, he managed to humanise historical figures by expressing certain deep emotions, lifting his portrayals of Communist Party leaders (in The Bonus, 1974, and in Wrong Connection, 1977) above the popular film stereotypes.

Thankfully, Yankovsky was cast to play the father in Tarkovsky's intensely personal dreamlike and somewhat hermetic The Mirror. It was the first of his films to be shown widely in the west. But he had to wait another eight years, for Tarkovsky's Nostalgia, before he was internationally recognised again. This time he played the lead role – a Russian poet and musicologist doing research at a spa in the Tuscan hills. As an obscure act of faith, Yankovsky crosses an ancient sulphur pool from one side to the other carrying a lighted candle. With his lean, ascetic face and dark eyes, he was ideal as a man in extremis, through whom Tarkovsky, in his first film made outside the Soviet Union, expressed his melancholy and homesickness.

Yankovsky himself suffered little homesickness, being one of the few Soviet actors at the time to spend an extended period filming abroad. "I was bowled over by capitalism – for six months, luxury hotels, Rome, Florence," he told Pravda.

Other films that had showings world-wide in which Yankovsky appeared were The Shooting Party (1978), based on the Chekhov story, where he was superb as Kamyshev, an intellectual crushed by the pettiness and false morality of a small provincial town; Dream Flights (1982), electrifying as a complacent adulterer painfully forced to reassess his life; The Kreutzer Sonata (1987), adapted from Tolstoy, where his portrayal of jealousy erupting into hate is a tour de force, and Assassin of the Tsar (1991), in which he played both a psychiatrist to a deluded patient (Malcolm McDowell), as well as Tsar Nicholas II.

Among the few films he made abroad was Sally Potter's over-ambitious The Man Who Cried (2000), in which he impressed as Christina Ricci's Jewish father, who emigrates to the US from Russia. In the meanwhile, Yankovsky was carrying on a parallel career at Lenkom, the Moscow State theatre, which he joined in 1973. "Without the theatre, an actor isn't an actor," he once declared.

Yankovsky, who was the last actor to be awarded the title of People's Artist of the Soviet Union, is survived by his son, the actor and film director Filipp Yankovsky, who appeared as a young child in The Mirror, and his wife, the Lenkom actor Lyudmila Zorina.

Ronald Bergan

Oleg Yankovsky, actor, born 23 February 1944; died 20 May 2009

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