Nikolay Olyalin

Nikolay Olyalin
Nikolay Olyalin (left) in 1974
Born	(1941-05-22)May 22, 1941 Opikhalino, Vologodsky District, Vologda Oblast, Russian SFSR
Died	November 19, 2009(2009-11-19) (aged 68) Kiev, Ukraine
Occupation	Actor, director
Years active	1954-2009
Spouse(s)	Nella Olyalina

Nikolay Vladimiriovich Olyalin (Russian: Николай Владимирович Олялин; May 22, 1941 - November 17, 2009) was a Soviet-Ukrainian actor of Russian ethnicity.

As a child, Olyalin took drama classes at school. On 1959, When his father sent him to a military academy in Leningrad, hoping that he would become an army topographer, Olyalin chose to study in the Leningrad State Institute of Theater, Music and Cinematography instead. After graduating at 1964, he joined the Krasnoyarsk Children's Theater, where - in spite of having tense relations with the director - he was considered the best comical actor among the cast. There, he met his wife, Nella, who was the second secretary of the local Komsomol.

Olyalin made his debut on screen depicting a test pilot in the 1965 film Days of Summer. Afterwards, he received many invitations to play in other motion pictures, but the Theater manager never told him of those and threw them away. When a letter from the Mosfilm studio reached Krasnoyarsk, offering Olyalin the main role in Yuri Ozerov's Liberation, one of the couriers told him of the matter. He claimed to be sick, took a leave and boarded a flight to Moscow. The character of Captain Tzvetaev, which he portrayed in the five parts of Liberation, gained him fame throughout the Soviet Union.

At 1968, during the filming of Ozerov's series, Olyalin met director Vasili Tzvirkunov from the Dovzhenko Film Studios and accepted his proposal to work with the company. He starred in several films during the early 1970s, among which was the popular Gentlemen of Fortune, and received the Ukrainian SSR Komsomol's Nikolai Ostrovsky Prize on 1972. Overall, he appeared in some sixty cinema and television productions until his departure.