Died actress Irina Miroshnichenko

The great Irina Miroshnichenko, whose acting range was as fantastic as her beauty, died in a Moscow hospital at the age of 82.

On a Moscow afternoon in 1965, in the National Café, famous among bohemians, a certain dude looked too intently at a fashionable girl no less than he (“I’m like this: jeans, shirt, heavily made up”), who drank coffee and cake at lunchtime. Noticing his gaze, the stately blonde snorted and showed the dude a wedding ring on her finger: then she was married to the famous playwright, author of the theater Leniniana Mikhail Shatrov. The next day, the same dude, who turned out to be Andrei Tarkovsky, called the girl to Mosfilm to audition for the tiny, but most important role of Mary Magdalene for the film Andrei Rublev (1966).

“How did you see Mary in me?” – Irina Miroshnichenko will ask the director later. The answer was: “You have an iconic face.”

By that time, the daughter of the junior political instructor Pyotr Vainshtein, who worked after demobilization as a supply manager in medical institutions, and Yekaterina Miroshnichenko, a student of Tairov and an employee of the Mosconcert, had already graduated from the Moscow Art Theater School and rehearsed under the direction of Boris Livanov the first “role with words” in the theater of her life. The great old man noticed her, rushing along the Moscow Art Theater stairs, and greeted with the words: “Have you broken the chain?” Running up the stairs was accompanied by the ringing of a chain belt on a dress brought by Shatrov from Italy.

She also had film experience. For the episodic role of Kolka’s sister (Nikita Mikhalkov) in “I’m walking around Moscow” (1963) by Georgy Danelia – there she sewed up Kolka’s friend’s trousers and called her brother an idiot – she had already been expelled from the Studio School, but limited to a strict reprimand: students were strictly strictly forbidden to play in the movies. The film by Anton Timonishin “They knew only by sight” (1966) has already made her a star and a real sex bomb. In the heroic thriller, she played a scout working in occupied Odessa under the guise of a restaurant singer.

She could have continued to exploit her mermaid-Cossack appearance on the screen, but she was too talented and smart for this.

Tarkovsky saw in her a sublime purity, invulnerable to any life’s dirt. But even with Timonishin, she played precisely that sacrificial purity, forced by the tragic circumstances of the war to pretend to be her opposite.

No wonder Miroshnichenko played several roles in films about intelligence officers living a double life. The best of them, she considered the role of the Latin American underground worker Maria in the film of her second husband, the brilliant Vytautas Zhalakyavichyus, “This sweet word is freedom!” (1972). But her finest hour in genre cinema is the role of Marina Suritskaya in Mission to Kabul (1970) by Leonid Kvinikhidze. A refugee who, with her husband, an officer, made the journey from Sovdepiya to Afghanistan, demonstrating incredible legs worthy of Marlene Dietrich, but exhausted by the road, gave the owner of the brothel, who offered her a job, an arrogant and aristocratic thrashing. The viewer froze: how, such beauty, and against us. The ending was reassuring: Marina turned out to be a security officer, again sacrificing herself, only not to the Christian, but to the red faith.

Miroshnichenko’s acting range is comparable only to that of Oleg Yankovsky: she, too, could do everything on stage and on the screen.

In the Moscow Art Theater, where she played dozens of roles, she was primarily a Chekhov heroine. Olga and then Masha in “Three Sisters”. Masha, and then Arkadina in The Seagull. Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard. But in the cinema she met Chekhov only once – in “Uncle Vanya” (1970) by Andrei Konchalovsky. Although she played in the theater and the aristocrats Karamzin and Fikelmont in Leonid Zorin’s Bronze Grandmother, and the Socialist-Revolutionary fanatic Spiridonova in Shatrov’s The Sixth of July, and the tragic Serafina in Tennessee Williams’ Tattooed Rose directed by Roman Viktyuk.

In the cinema, her talent unfolded even more generously. A village woman, a soldier’s widow from a devastated village in Nikolai Gubenko’s tragic debut A Soldier Came from the Front (1971). A business woman, the head of the factory planning department, who entered into a hopeless love affair, in Viktor Sokolov’s production drama This Is Our Home (1973). The refined and stern actress Maria Andreeva, wife of Maxim Gorky, in the historical and revolutionary “Trust” (1975) by Viktor Tregubovich. The mother of Katya, a schoolgirl in love with a classmate, in the sensational drama about teenage love by Ilya Frez “You never dreamed of” (1980). Always different. Always irresistible. Always persuasive.

Miroshnichenko allowed herself to misbehave. Played in notorious thrash. She parodied other of her heroines.

For example, in Iona Scutelnik’s crazy Moldavian thriller “Secret Service Agent” (1978), where she was CIA agent Lidia Flori, aka Maria Valutse, who pretended to be a folklorist in order to seduce and recruit a naive violinist. Or in “The Secrets of Madame Wong” (1986) by Stepan Puchinyan, where she played no more, no less, as the queen of the pirates of the Pacific Ocean. Her mere presence ennobled uncomplicated handicrafts.

And Miroshnichenko also had one feature that radically distinguished her from many colleagues in the shop. That in memoirs, which seem ridiculously carefree, that in interviews, she never allowed herself a single unkind word either about her colleagues, or about directors, or about husbands. Although she had reasons to slander on this or that occasion. But she remained filled with gratitude for life, which gave her acting happiness.

Mikhail Trofimenkov