Igor Ilyinsky

Igor Ilyinsky
Igor Ilyinsky as Tapioka in the film The Three Million Trial. 1926.
Birth name	Igor Vladimirovich Ilyinsky
Born	(1901-07-24)24 July 1901 Moscow, Russian Empire (present-day Moscow, Russia)
Died	13 January 1987(1987-01-13) (aged 85) Moscow, Soviet Union (present-day Moscow, Russia)
Genres	Slapstick, mime, comedy
Spouse	Tatiana Ilyinskaya (c. 1920-1945; her death) Tatyana Yeremeeva (1951-1987; his death)

Igor Vladimirovich Ilyinsky (Russian: И́горь Влади́мирович Ильи́нский; 24 July 1901 – 13 January 1987) was a famous Russian film and stage actor, director and comedian.

Igor Ilyinsky was born on 24 July 1901 in Moscow. At age 16 he entered the Theatre Studio of Theodore Komisarjevsky and in half a year already debuted on the professional stage in Komissarjevsky Theatre. His first theatre role was that of the "Old Man" in Aristophanes' play Lysistrata. In 1920, he joined the Vsevolod Meyerhold Theatre. The young actor's style was in correspondence with the principles of Meyerhold, and so Ilyinsky soon became the central actor of that theatre. At the Meyerhold Theatre he worked for over ten years. It is interesting to note that for some time Ilyinsky was the only young actor, who Meyerhold respectfully called by his first and patronymic names, "Igor Vladimirovich".

In the mid-1920s Ilyinsky started to appear in movies, where he also played vivid comic characters. In 1924, Yakov Protazanov featured him in his famous futuristic film Aelita, which was followed by his role in Protazanov's comedy The Tailor from Torzhok (1925). In 1926, he appeared in three films.

“I can act on the roof of a train carriage, on the radiator of a moving car, on back of a galloping horse, or while swimming in the sea”.

In 1938 he joined the Maly Theatre that had been his favourite one since school years. Afterwards Ilyinsky stayed in the Maly Theatre for almost fifty years and even staged several plays there himself. Ilyinsky would later write that it was Russian classic literature that had helped him overcome the crisis and feeling that he had been unable to create new characters, different from the previous ones. An outstandingly prolific period in the actor’s life was related to his work with the famous film director Grigori Aleksandrov. In 1938 Ilyinsky splendidly acted as Byvalov in the comedy Volga-Volga (for this role, he was awarded Stalin Prize in 1941). He deliberately avoided any comic traits in his character to create a common image of a red-tapist.