Grigori Nikulin

Grigori Geogievich Nikulin was born on Decmber 5, 1922, in the village of Treshchovka, Saratov province, USSR. His father, Georgi Nikulin, was a Volga boatman, turned Red Army soldier during the Communist Revolution of 1917, and the Russian Civil War. Young Grigori Nikulin attended a rural school until the beginning of the Second World War. In 1940 he was drafted in the Red Army, and fought in the Eastern Front. He took part in several major battles of WWII from the Stalingrad Battle, all the way to the Battle for Berlin, Germany. In 1945, Grigori Nikulin was member of the special security unit guarding the meeting of prime minister Winston Churchill, president Harry S. Truman, and Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference. He was wounded and discharged with honors, and was decorated the Medal of Victory in the Second World War. After the WWII, Grigori Nikulin attended the Leningrad Institute of Theatre and Cinema, graduating in 1952, as a film director. From 1952 to 1956, he was director with the troupe of the Bolshoi Drama Theatre (BDT) in Leningrad. In 1956, Grigori Nikulin made his film directing debut with The Bride (1957), a classic drama was also an acting debut for young Oleg Basilashvili. Grigori Nikulin was among the first film directors who cast then unknown actor Vladimir Vysotskiy as co-star in the drama 713 prosit posadku (1962). During the 1960s and 1970s, he made several adaptations of Russian literature for film and television. During the 1980s, Nikulin produced and directed his largest film, a ten-hour long epic Khleb - imya sushchestvitelnoe (1988) (aka.. Bread is the proper noun), which was released in theatres and on television. From 1950s to 2000s, Grigori Nikulin was film director and producer at Lenfilm Studios, working with such stars of Russian cinema as Kirill Lavrov, Oleg Basilashvili, Alisa Freyndlikh, Nina Ruslanova, Natalya Sayko, Stanislav Lyubshin, Sergey Nikonenko, and many other notable actors. He also taught film directing at his master class in Leningrad. He died of a heart failure on August 15, 2007, at his home in St. Petersburg, and was laid to rest in Smolenskoe Cemetery in St. Petersburg, Russia.