Mikhail Kononov (1940 - 2007)
Photo: ITAR-TASS
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Actor Mikhail Kononov Dies at 67
Obituary
Acclaimed Russian actor Mikhail Kononov died in a Moscow hospital on Monday after a long illness. The People’s Artist of Russia starred in more than 50 movies but he is best remembered for a part in The Chief of Chukotka (1966).
His open face and teenage looks became a symbol for the 1960s in the Soviet Union, a time of the Thaw which brought real human faces to the screen, throwing away heroes of propaganda posters.
Mikhail Kononov made his movie debut in 1961 in Ivan Pyryev’s Our Common Friend. The actor’s unassuming manners and quite plain looks made him a perfect boy next door, Kolya or Vitya, for Russian cinema.
He was probably best known as a protagonist in The Chief of Chukotka where he was playing a fervent young man who ended up in Chukotka in the north after the Russian civil war. His character had to travel around the world to recover the stolen money and get it back to Moscow.
Kononov’s fame waned by the 1970s which were marked for him only by parts in Alexei German’s Twenty Days Without War (1976) and Andrei Konchalovsky’s epic Siberiade (1978). Andrei Tarkovsky, who filmed the actor in Andrei Rublev (1966), did not live to fulfill his dream and see him as Richard III.
Mikhail Kononov was largely forgotten as an actor in the rocky 1990s. He left Moscow to live hundred miles from the city on a farm. He went back to the cinema only once to play in Gleb Panfilov’s The First Circle (2005), a screen version for Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book of the same title. The actor is believed to have lived his last days in severe poverty.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of July 18, 2007
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