Actor Andrei Myagkov Dies at Age 82

Andrei Myagkov, an actor most famous for his role of Zhenya Lukashin in the 1975 New Year’s hit, “Irony of Fate,” directed by Eldar Rozanov, died of an apparent heart attack at the age of 82 at his home in Moscow.

Myagkov was born in Leningrad in 1938 and graduated from the Moscow Art Theater School in 1964. After graduation he joined the remarkable troupe of the Sovremennik Theater, which in those years included Oleg Yefremov, Yevgeny Yevstigneyev, Galina Volchek, Oleg Tabakov and Valentin Gaft. At the end of the 1970s Myagkov switched to the Moscow Art Theater, where he was one of the leading actors for several decades.

His cinema debut was in the 1965 comedy “Adventures of a Dentist,” directed by Elim Klimov. But he was best known and loved for his work with director Rozanov, first as the Moscow surgeon who ends up in the right apartment in the wrong city in “Irony of Fate,” and then as Anatoly Novoseltsev with Alisa Freindlich in “Office Romance” and as lab worker Khvostov in “Garage.” He is also renowned for his role in “The Days of the Turbins,” based on the eponymous novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. Over his career, he acted in more 50 films.

In more recent years Myagkov taught at the Moscow Art Theater School, painted and wrote three detective stories for his wife, actress Anastasiya Voznesenskaya, whom he married in 1963. He said he wrote them “only because she had nothing interesting to read.”

No announcement about the funeral arrangements has been made.