One hundred years ago Evgeniy Evstigneev was born. Among his many roles, two stand out. One you know is Professor Preobrazhensky. The other one is much less known - after all, this film was banned for 20 yearstranslated

Evgeny Evstigneev in the play “The Naked King” Evgeny Evstigneev was born on October 9, 1926, the star of Sovremennik, the main Moscow theater during the Thaw, and one of the most recognizable actors in Soviet cinema. His roles in popular films and TV series are well known: Comrade Dynin in Welcome, or No Trespassing, Professor Pleischner in Seventeen Moments of Spring, amateur theater director in Beware of the Car. However, the actor also had less famous, although no less brilliant, works. Anton Dolin remembers both.

One of my biggest regrets is that I did not have the opportunity to appreciate Evgeny Evstigneev’s gift on the theater stage. They say that he was capable of such improvisation, such buffoonery and such psychological immersion in the image that it overshadowed even his most stellar film roles. It’s not for nothing that back in Sovremennik, where his career began, he received the nickname “Evsti the genius.” Only Evstigneev-Firs flashed before my teenage eyes in the not-too-successful performance of the Anton Chekhov Theater as a symbolic farewell to an era, now available only in fragmentary recordings. In 1992, the actor passed away due to a heart condition. He lived only...