Renowned Actor Oleg Yankovsky Dead at 65

Acclaimed actor Oleg Yankovsky, whose lean face and intense dark eyes made him one of the great heartthrobs of the Soviet era, died Wednesday after an illness. He was 65.

Yankovsky died at a Moscow hospital after a battle with cancer, Yulia Kosareva, spokeswoman for Lenkom, the Moscow theater where the actor worked for decades, told The Associated Press.

Yankovsky combined a successful film career with theater roles and was one of the star actors at the Lenkom. Famous not only for his dashing image, he won acclaim for his subtle performances in ambiguous roles.

President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin both offered their condolences to Yankovsky's family.

"Possessing a rare combination of acting talent, charisma and a fine mind, he was able to rise above his time and fully reflect the time," Medvedev said in a telegram to the actor's family.

Putin described him as a "true master, an extraordinary person rich in talents and a born actor."

In a screen career spanning five decades, Yankovsky appeared in more than 70 films, often cast as aristocrats in period dramas because of his stately appearance, which contrasted with the proletarian prototypes common in Soviet cinema.

Of him was famously said, "Only Yankovsky knows how to wear a tailcoat."

Yankovsky managed to inject sympathy into unpleasant characters, such as the two-timing, selfish husband in "Flights in Dreams and Waking," or the morbid sex-obsessed hero of "The Kreutzer Sonata," based on Leo Tolstoy's short story.

He was the last actor to be awarded the honorary title of "People's Artist of the Soviet Union."

While he was president of Kinotavr film festival for many years and appeared at a few social events, Yankovsky rarely gave interviews or talked about his personal life.

In 2004, Moskovsky Komsomolets published an interview with him under the headline: "The Loudest Man Who Kept Silent."

Yankovsky was born Feb. 23, 1944, into a family of Polish origin in the village of Zhezkazgan in Kazakhstan, where his father — a former tsarist army officer who joined the Red Army — was exiled in Soviet leader Josef Stalin's crackdown on "Trotskyites" in the military.

The family talked about his father, who died in a prison camp, "in a whisper," Yankovsky told Komsomolskaya Pravda in December. "Mother explained to us in veiled terms where our father was. But I remembered my father's arrest all the same. I saw it with my own eyes."

After Stalin's death in 1953, the family was allowed to move to Saratov.

Yankovsky went to drama school there and began acting in the city's theater.

His performance as Prince Myshkin in Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" led to an offer to join the Lenkom in Moscow in 1973. He continued performing at the Lenkom until three months before his death.

"Without the theater, an actor isn't an actor," he said in an interview with Izvestia in 2004.

Yankovsky's first screen role was in "Shield and Sword" in 1968. The four-part film told the story of a Soviet spy in wartime Germany. Yankovsky was cast in the supporting role of a German.

He then appeared in the Civil War drama "There Served Two Comrades," this time in a starring role. The film also starred beloved Soviet bard Vladimir Vysotsky.

The role was a largely silent one, and the director told him to act through observation, he said in an interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets in 2004. "I then began to develop that quality of watching and putting across something of my own in my gaze," he said.

Yankovsky also appeared in Andrei Tarkovsky's "The Mirror" and "Nostalgia," which was filmed in Italy.

Tarkovsky chose the actor after his assistant spotted Yankovsky in a hallway at the Mosfilm studio, Yankovsky said in an interview with Izvestia in 2004.

It was rare for a Soviet actor to spend an extended period filming abroad.

"I was bowled over by capitalism most of all when I was filming "Nostalgia" with Tarkovsky — for six months, luxury hotels, Rome, Florence," he told Komsomolskaya Pravda.

He appeared in several films directed by Mark Zakharov, head of Lenkom Theater, including "That Very Munchhausen" in 1979, in which he played the title role as a misunderstood dreamer who rejects the grimness of what everyone else insists is reality.

In recent years, Yankovsky drastically limited his screen roles and did not appear in any of the standard television dramas that allow many low-paid theater actors to subsist.

He told Komsomolskaya Pravda that he refused the role of Woland in Vladimir Bortko's 2005 television adaptation of "The Master and Margarita" because he did not think that it was possible to act the role of God or the devil.

He made exceptions for roles in a television adaptation of "Doctor Zhivago" in 2006, where he played Komarovsky, and Sergei Solovyov's "Anna Karenina," a film due to premiere May 31, in which he plays Anna's despised husband.

Yankovsky's body will lie in state at the Lenkom Theater on Friday at 11 a.m. for the public to pay their last respects, the theater's web site said.

He is to be buried at Novodevichy Cemetery, Zakharov, the Lenkom director, told Interfax.

Yankovsky is survived by his son, actor and film director Filipp Yankovsky, his wife, Lenkom actress Lyudmila Zorina, and his grandson, Ivan, who is embarking on an acting career.