Alexander Godunov
| Alexander Godunov | |
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| Born |
Alexander Borisovich Godunov November 28, 1949 Sakhalin, Russian SFSR, USSR |
| Died | May 18, 1995 (aged 45) West Hollywood, California, U.S. |
| Cause of death | Complications from hepatitis due to chronic alcoholism |
| Nationality |
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| Spouse(s) | Lyudmila Vlasova (m. 1971; div. 1982) |
Alexander Borisovich Godunov (Russian: Александр Борисович Годунов; November 28, 1949 – May 18, 1995) was a Russian-American ballet dancer and film actor, whose defection caused a diplomatic incident between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Godunov was born in Sakhalin, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, in the Russian Far East. Godunov began his ballet studies in Riga in 1958, in the same class as Mikhail Baryshnikov. The two became friends and helped each other throughout their years there. Godunov joined the Bolshoi Ballet in 1971 and rose to become Premier danseur. His teachers there included Aleksey Yermolayev.
In 1973, he won a gold medal at the Moscow International Ballet Competition. After playing Lemisson, the Royal Musician, in The Thirty-first of June (Soviet, 1978) by J. B. Priestley, Godunov became well known in the Soviet Union as a movie actor. His roles included Vronsky in Anna Karenina (1976).
On August 21, 1979, while on a tour with the Bolshoi Ballet in New York City, Godunov contacted authorities and asked for political asylum. After discovering his absence, the KGB responded by putting his wife, Lyudmila Vlasova, a soloist with the company, on a plane to Moscow, but the flight was stopped before takeoff. After three days, with involvement by President Jimmy Carter and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, the U.S. State Department was satisfied that Vlasova had chosen to return to the Soviet Union of her own free will, and allowed the plane to depart. This incident was dramatised in a 1986 movie Flight 222. Vlasova later said that while Godunov loved American culture and had long desired to live in the United States, she felt she was "too Russian" to live in the United States. The couple divorced in 1982.
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