Innokenty Smoktunovsky

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Smoktunovsky as Hamlet in the 1966 movie.

Innokentiy Mikhailovich Smoktunovsky (Russian: 1925-1994) was a Russian actor acclaimed as the "king of Soviet actors". He was named People's Artist of the USSR in 1974 and the Hero of Socialist Labour in 1990.

Smoktunovsky was born in a Siberian village and served in the Red Army during the WWII. In 1946, he joined a theatre in Krasnoyarsk, later moving to Moscow. In 1957, he was invited by Georgi Tovstonogov to join the Bolshoi Drama Theatre of Leningrad, where he stunned the public with his dramatic interpretation of Prince Myshkin in Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. His career in film was launched by Mikhail Romm's movie Nine Days of One Year (1962). In 1964, he was cast in the role of Hamlet in the celebrated Grigori Kozintsev's screen version of Shakespeare's play, which won him a praise from Laurence Olivier and the Lenin Prize. Smoktunovsky became known to wider audiences as Yuri Detochkin in Eldar Ryazanov's mock detective Beware of the Car (1966). Later, he played Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky in Tchaikovsky (1969), Uncle Vanya in Andrei Konchalovsky's screen version of Chekhov's play (1970), the Narrator in Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror (1975), an old man in Anatoly Efros's On Thursday and Never Again (1977), and Salieri in Mikhail Schwejzer's Little Tragedies (1980) based on Alexander Pushkin's plays.

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