Celebrity Biographies
Oleg Yankovsky
Oleg Yankovskiy was a great star of Russian cinema. Internationally, he was especially known for his work under Andrei Tarkovsky. The actor died on May 20, as a result of pancreatic cancer, according to Yulia Kosareva, a spokeswoman for the Lenkom Theater in Moscow, where he worked for more than four decades.
Oleg Yankovskiy was born on February 22, 1944 in Jezkazgan, a Kazakh city where his parents, who belonged to an aristocratic family, had gone into exile during the harsh years of Stalin’s repression. He has participated in some seventy films, since he debuted in 1966 with the unknown romantic drama O lyubvi . Andrei Tarkovsky recruited him to star in his autobiographical film The Mirror , where he played his father. Later he turned to him again to lead the cast of Nostalgia , in which he gave life to the poet Andre Gorkachov, who traveled through Italy to investigate the life of an 18th-century musician.
Despite the enormous international impact of his films under Tarkovsky, Yankovskiy was best known in Russia for Tot samyy Myunkhgauzen (The Baron Munchhausen), which had unprecedented success there, long before Terry Gilliam ‘s version. . His last work was Tsar , by Pavel Lungin , where he played Ivan the Terrible’s childhood friend, a film presented at the recent edition of the Cannes Film Festival. On his death, he is survived by his wife, the actress Lyudmila Zorina, a son – the actor and film director Filipp Yankovskiy – and a grandson who is a journalist.