Five days before her death, actress Galina Yatskina accepted the schema and dedicated herself to God

One of her best roles was lawyer Irina Mezhnikova in “A Word for Defense” by Vadim Abdrashitov

On March 14, the funeral of Honored Artist of the Russian Federation Galina Yatskina will be held in Saratov. This is her will. Galina Ivanovna died on March 10 at the age of 80 after a long illness. And five days before her death she was tonsured into the schema with the name Vera.

Galina Yatskina was a believer and in recent years she led a secluded life, rarely appearing anywhere unless it was related to her educational activities and the “Under the Sun” project.

She was born on June 16, 1944 in Makhachkala. She studied on the course of the legendary teacher and director Boris Zakhava at the Theater School. Boris Shchukin, where she later taught. Galina Yatskina was proud that among her students were Sergei Makovetsky, Sergei Zhigunov, Alexander Gordon. Galina Ivanovna worked for a short time at the theater. Stanislavsky, then in the theaters named after. Vl. Mayakovsky and Leninsky Komsomol. Being an actress, she defended her dissertation and received a PhD in art history.

Her film debut took place in 1962 in Iskra Babich’s film “Flood,” where Galina played an orphan from a village who became a hero of Socialist Labor. Viewers of the older generation remembered her in the film “Women” by Pavel Lyubimov, which became the leader of the Soviet box office in 1966. In the foyer of the House of Cinema, where now in memory of the departed actress her portrait is displayed and a bouquet of flowers is placed, visitors first of all remember this particular picture, where Yatskina starred with Nina Sazonova and Inna Makarova.

In “A Word for Defense” by Vadim Abdrashitov, she played lawyer Irina Mezhnikova, who has a fiancé (Oleg Yankovsky), the relationship with whom, one might say, will collapse after one court case. The role of the client Irina was played by Marina Neyolova. Mezhnikova’s speech in court will be decisive in the history of the strange murder. In 1977, Galina Yatskina received the prize for best actress for her role as Irina, and she herself valued it very much.

Galina Ivanovna also starred as a mother in “French Lessons” by Evgeny Tashkov based on the prose of Valentin Rasputin, played a senior investigator in “The Man Who Closed the City” by Alexander Gordon, where her partners were Rodion Nahapetov and Vitaly Solomin, with whom she often met on the set site.

Her filmography includes Yatskina’s three-part teleplay “What to do?” directed by Roman Reznikov based on the novel of the same name by Chernyshevsky, where she played Vera. In the teleplay “At the Time of the Plague” based on Pushkin’s “Little Tragedies,” which was filmed by Mark Zakharov for the 175th anniversary of the poet’s birth, Galina Ivanovna played the role of Louise.

Another important work of hers is Claudia in the film “The End of the Lyubavins” based on Vasily Shukshin’s novel “The Lyubavins”, which was filmed by director Leonid Golovnya. She also had a chance to meet in the film “I’ll Take Your Pain” with the classic of Belarusian cinema Mikhail Ptashuk.

In the 80s, Galina Ivanovna worked in Kabul at the Afganfilm film studio. With her son Vasily, she organized her own film company “Kinokontakt” in Moscow, where she created films with Orthodox themes, struggled with demographic problems and drug addiction, as best she could and as she understood it. She traveled with her paintings and videos to prisons, universities and schools, where she talked about the problems of juvenile justice and family, about faith in its various aspects, about what worried her personally.