Vladimir Rostislavovich Gardin

Born Jan. 6 (18), 1877, in Moscow; died May 28, 1965, in Leningrad. Soviet Russian actor and director. People’s Artist of the USSR (1947).

Gardin began his artistic career in 1898 in provincial theaters. In 1904-05 he acted at the V. F. Komissarzhevskaia Theater in St. Petersburg; subsequently he was with the Moscow Korsh Theater. His roles included Fedor Karamazov in an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Fedia Protasov in Tolstoy’s The Living Corpse. In 1913 he began working in motion pictures. He became known as a director and screenwriter for his filmed versions of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1914), The Kreutzer Sonata (1914), and War and Peace (1915 with la. A. Protazanov); of Turgenev’s A Nest of Gentlefolk (1915) and On the Eve (1915); and of Mamin-Sibiriak’s The Privalov Millions (1915). After the October Revolution, he organized and was head of the First State Motion Picture School (1919, now the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography). He also made the films Ninety-six (1919), Hammer and Sickle (1921), The Cross and the Mauser (1925), The Poet and the Tsar (1927), and Kastus’ Kalinovskii (1928). As an actor in sound films he exhibited high craftsmanship and a brilliant mastery of self-transformation. His best roles were the old worker Babchenko in The Firstcomer (1932) and Porfirii Golovlev in Iudushka Golovlev (1934), after the novel The Golovlev Family by Saltykov-Shchedrin. Gardin was awarded three orders and various medals.