Leonid Mironovich Leonidov was a Russian actor and stage director.

Biography

Born in a Jewish family in Odessa

Odessa

Odessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...

 (his real last name was Volfenzon), he worked in the Moscow Art Theatre

Moscow Art Theatre

The Moscow Art Theatre is a theatre company in Moscow that the seminal Russian theatre practitioner Constantin Stanislavski, together with the playwright and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, founded in 1898. It was conceived as a venue for naturalistic theatre, in contrast to the melodramas...

 from 1903. His roles included Dmitri Karamazov, Othello

Othello

The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in approximately 1603, and based on the Italian short story "Un Capitano Moro" by Cinthio, a disciple of Boccaccio, first published in 1565...

, Lopakhin

The Cherry Orchard

The Cherry Orchard is Russian playwright Anton Chekhov's last play. It premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre 17 January 1904 in a production directed by Constantin Stanislavski. Chekhov intended this play as a comedy and it does contain some elements of farce; however, Stanislavski insisted on...

. In 1920s and 1930s he also appeared in several films. Konstantin Stanislavski

Konstantin Stanislavski

Constantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski , was a Russian actor and theatre director. Building on the directorially-unified aesthetic and ensemble playing of the Meiningen company and the naturalistic staging of Antoine and the independent theatre movement, Stanislavski organized his realistic...

 called him "the only Russian tragic actor." Leonidov was honored with People's Artist of the USSR

People's Artist of the USSR

People's Artist of the USSR, also sometimes translated as National Artist of the USSR, was an honorary title granted to citizens of the Soviet Union.- Nomenclature and significance :...

 in 1936.

Selected filmography

• Marionettes
  Marionettes (film)
  Marionettes is a 1934 Soviet antifascist film starring Anatoli Ktorov and directed by Yakov Protazanov and Porfiri Podobed.The film combines the features of comedy, social drama and political pamphlet.-Cast:* Anatoli Ktorov - C, the Prince...
  
  (1934)
• Gobseck
  Gobseck
  Gobseck is an 1830 novel by French author Honoré de Balzac and included in the Scènes de la vie privée section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine. Gobseck first appeared in outline form in La Mode in March 1830 under the title l’Usurier , and then in August 1830 in the periodical Le Voleur...
  
  (1937) .... Gobseck
• Seeds of Freedom (1929)
• V gorod vkhodit nelzya (1928)
• The Wings of a Serf (1926) - Tsar Ivan the Terrible
• The Iron Heel (1919)
• Peter and Alexis (1919)
• Bread (1918)

External links

• Leonid Leonidov at Peoples