Yuri Lyubimov dies at 97; Russian actor and director

Russian actor and director Yuri Lyubimov, founder of Moscow’s renowned Taganka Theater, which he led for more than four decades, has died. He was 97.

During the 1980s, Lyubimov was exiled for several years after criticizing cultural restrictions in the Soviet Union in an interview with the Times of London.

Lyubimov’s death Sunday in a Moscow hospital led Russian television and radio news broadcasts. President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman expressed Putin’s condolences, noting that “it would be difficult to overestimate the role of Yuri Lyubimov in the development of modern Russian theater.”

His wife, Katalin Lyubimova, told the Tass news agency that he died peacefully in his sleep Sunday morning, three days after he was hospitalized.

Lyubimov founded the Taganka Theater in 1964. Among those he brought to his new theater was Vladimir Vysotsky, an actor and singer-songwriter who became a cultural icon of the Soviet period.

The theater began to come under pressure after Vysotsky’s death in 1980. The public outpouring of grief and the huge crowds that turned out for his funeral, which Lyubimov helped to organize, alarmed the Kremlin.

Plays at Lyubimov’s theater were banned, including a production dedicated to Vysotsky. After giving the critical interview to the Times of London while in England in 1983, Lyubimov was stripped of his Soviet citizenship the next year and barred from returning.

While in exile, he directed plays and operas at some of the leading theaters in the United States and Europe.

Lyubimov was allowed to return to the Soviet Union in 1988, and his citizenship was restored the following year. He regained his position at the theater but left in 2011 after a dispute with the actors.

Despite his age, he continued to work, and in 2013 he staged the opera “Prince Igor” at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow.

Lyubimov was born Sept. 30, 1917, and studied theater arts before serving in the Soviet army. After World War II he worked as an actor and director at the Vakhtangov Theater in Moscow, where his funeral is scheduled to be held Wednesday.

Berry writes for the Associated Press.

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