Obituary for Igor Yasulovich

At the age of 82, the artist Igor Yasulovich died. Actor, film director, screenwriter, teacher, owner of a memorable voice, unusual plasticity and that set of human qualities called “intelligence”.

Calling actors intellectuals, rulers of thoughts and bearers of spiritual values ​​began under Stalin – the real intelligentsia by that time was completely devoid of a voice. Actors, whose profession is to give a noble sound to someone else’s smart (or vice versa) thoughts, are a much more plastic and safe tribe. It’s no secret that you can become a good actor without being an intellectual or even just an educated person: a talented actor is easily able to portray the depths of the human spirit and the movement of thought.

In this sense, Igor Nikolaevich Yasulovich was a black sheep. He made himself a synthetic actor, an educated person and an intellectual. And he continued this work until the last day. He was born in 1941, in a military family, the ancestors of his father are Belarusians. Throughout his childhood, the boy moved: he was born in the Kuibyshev region, grew up in Izmail near Odessa, and went to the first theater group in Tallinn.

In the late 1950s, he was very lucky: he was accepted into VGIK, on ​​the course of Mikhail Romm. On the course, he became friends with those whom he called “Zhenya” and “Lyusya” until the end of his life. Lyudmila Abramova (Vysotsky’s second wife and mother of his son Nikita) and Yevgeny Kharitonov – director, teacher of plastic arts, author of underground poetry and prose, which could not be published in the USSR. They say that Kharitonov wrote his first poems in the registry office – when Igor Yasulovich (then “Igoryasha”) married Natalya Egorova. The marriage proved strong. As for the poems, I’m not sure if they were published: Lyudmila Abramova read them to me from memory. According to her memoirs, Igor and Zhenya had one common quality characteristic of complexly organized beings – they developed, but were in no hurry. That’s why, according to her, Zhenya began to write poetry relatively late, and Igor gained real acting power only over the years.

At first, all three were “bruised” by pantomime: the course was taught by Alexander Rumnev, a brilliant dance director in Tairov’s performances, who served seven years in prison and by the end of the 1950s remained almost the only bearer of knowledge about the Tairov theater. In 1962, Yasulovich briefly became an actor in Ektemima (Experimental Pantomime Studio), which was created by Rumnev. Soon Rumnev died, Yasulovich went to the Film Actor Theater, and then, in 1974, he again entered Romm, but already as a director. They say that Kharitonov dissuaded him – it seemed to him that of their trinity, it was Igor who should remain an actor. He himself had long worked at the Theater of Mimicry and Gesture and wrote poetry. Lyudmila Abramova also left the profession – not only because of her sons. The Soviet screen and the stage were not very fond of well-read smart people. “And again the holy pallor / It crawled up my cheeks, / But Gaiety and Usefulness, as you know, are loved here,” Kharitonov writes about this. And he will die at the age of 40, remaining an underground genius.

Igor Yasulovich, endowed with an excellent appearance, was unlucky in the theater for a long time, but from the very beginning he was lucky in the cinema.

Starting with the passing role of the physicist Fedorov in Nine Days of One Year (he played it while still studying at VGIK) and to the roles of all the elegant, strange, eccentric characters of Soviet and post-Soviet cinema. Both cartoon characters and heroes of Western blockbusters spoke in his velvety voice – since the 1990s, when freedom came, Yasulovich made films, dubbed, taught at VGIK and GITIS.

Theatrical fame came to him after 1993 – the new time allowed director Kame Ginkas to come out of hiding. In his performances, staged on the stage of the Moscow Youth Theater, Igor Yasulovich reached unimaginable, impossible heights. The sinister trickster Black Monk, driving the scientist Kovrin crazy, at some point literally hovered over the abyss of the stalls – probably no other actor could combine a strange, cheerfully crazy look and a rare physical form. The downtrodden violinist Rothschild from the Ginkas-Chekhovian “Rothschild’s Violin”, the monk Pimen from “Boris Godunov” by Declan Donnellan and the jester Feste from his own “Twelfth Night” – for the last decades it seemed that Yasulovich’s range was boundless, and the possibilities were endless. They talked a lot about his roles in the performances of Ginkas “Father Sergius” and “The Last Tape of Krapp” – Yasulovich remained a great actor until the last day. But there is also something else. Until the last day he remained an intellectual. A smart, subtle and understanding person.

Alla Shenderova