OLEG YANKOVSKY (1944–2009)

Russian actor Oleg Yankovsky, best known in the West as the star of cult films by director Andrei Tarkovsky, died on Wednesday morning, reports RIA Novosti. He was sixty-five.

Yankovsky appeared in more than seventy films during his more than forty-year career, including the role of a wizard in the 1978 film An Everyday Miracle and the beast of the 1988 hit To Kill the Dragon. He was best known in the West for his roles in Mirror and Nostalgia, directed by Tarkovsky.

Along with pop diva Alla Pugachyova, he was the last person to be awarded the title People’s Artist of the Soviet Union before the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

His father was a victim of the Stalin-era purges, dying in a gulag labor camp after the family was exiled to Kazakhstan at the end of the 1930s.

“Yanokovsky’s charisma, the immensity of his personality, and his talent meant that his presence brought more to a scene than the actual role,” Roman Balayan, who directed the actor in six films, told RIA Novosti.

According to Bloomberg, Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin said, “Oleg Yankovsky was a true master, a unique, generously gifted person, an actor from God. [He] will always live in our memories, in the brilliant, unrepeatable images that this great Russian artist created.”