Sergei Bondarchuk

Biography

Sergei Bondarchuk (born 25 September 1920 in Bilozerka, Ukraine; died 20 October 1994 in Moscow) was a Soviet actor, director and screenwriter and one of the leading figures of Soviet cinema during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. He is best known for the large-scale historical and war epics that brought Soviet filmmaking to audiences abroad, and he worked across acting, directing and writing.

Born to a peasant family in what is now Ukraine, he grew up in Yeysk and Taganrog. He trained in theatre in Rostov before serving in the Red Army during the Second World War, fighting in the Caucasus and at Stalingrad. He made his film debut in 1948 with The Young Guard, directed by Sergei Gerasimov. In 1952, at the age of 32, he became the youngest Soviet actor to receive the title People's Artist of the USSR, the same year he won the Stalin Prize for Taras Shevchenko.

In 1955 he starred in Othello alongside Irina Skobtseva, who later became his second wife. He moved into directing in 1959 with Fate of a Man, an adaptation of a short story by Mikhail Sholokhov that was well received outside the Soviet Union, and the film earned him the Lenin Prize that year. Over time his work turned towards political and large-scale subjects, including They Fought for Their Country, which was entered in the 1975 Cannes Film Festival.

His best-known work is War and Peace, a multi-part adaptation of Tolstoy's novel that he filmed over several years with enormous resources. Bondarchuk directed it and played Pierre Bezukhov, and the film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1968. After that success he appeared in Battle of Neretva, directed by Veljko Bulajić, and made Waterloo (1970), his first English-language film, produced by Dino De Laurentiis. Critics praised its battle scenes, but it performed poorly at the box office.

His career was closely tied to Soviet institutions. He joined the Communist Party in 1970 and a year later became president of the Union of Cinematographers, a post he held until 1986. He died in Moscow in 1994. His legacy rests on his literary and war adaptations and on his role in bringing Soviet cinema to international attention. His children Natalya and Fyodor also worked in film, and a bronze statue of him was unveiled in Yeysk in 2007.

Key films

• War and Peace (1965–1967)
• Fate of a Man (1959)
• Waterloo (1970)
• Battle of Neretva (1969)
• They Fought for Their Country (1975)