Innokenty Smoktunovsky

Lore & Background

Smoktunovsky was born in a Siberian village to a peasant family of Belarusian ethnicity. Rumors of Polish noble ancestry were denied by the actor, who stated his family was Belarusian and not of nobility. He served in the Red Army during World War II, fighting at the battles of Kursk, the Dnieper, and Kiev. After the war, he joined a theatre in Krasnoyarsk in 1946, later moving to Moscow. In 1957, Georgy Tovstonogov invited him to the Bolshoi Drama Theatre of Leningrad, where his performance as Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot stunned the public. Another notable stage role was the title role in Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy's Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich at the Maly Theatre in 1973.

Reader's Guide

Smoktunovsky's film career began with Mikhail Romm's Nine Days in One Year (1962). His breakthrough came in 1964 as Prince Hamlet in Grigori Kozintsev's film, which earned him the Lenin Prize. Laurence Olivier called it 'the most brilliant I have ever seen.' British critics praised the performance: Dilys Powell described Smoktunovsky's acting as 'of extraordinary intelligence – a Hamlet who is not merely melancholy but actively dangerous, a man who could kill with a word.' Tom Milne wrote he was 'a forceful, sane, sensitive Hamlet trapped in a prison of political intrigue.' Smoktunovsky's portrayal blended manly simplicity, aristocratism, kindness, sarcasm, and self-sacrifice. He later showed comic gifts as Yuri Detochkin in Beware of the Car (1966) and played Tchaikovsky (1969), Uncle Vanya (1970), the Narrator in Mirror (1975), an old man in On Thursday and Never Again (1977), and Salieri in Little Tragedies (1979). He won the Nika Award for Best Actor in 1990. The minor planet 4926 Smoktunovskij was named after him.

Did You Know?

• He denied rumors of Polish noble ancestry, stating his family was Belarusian and not of nobility.
• Laurence Olivier wrote to director Grigori Kozintsev that his Hamlet was 'the most brilliant I have ever seen.'