PASSINGS
Oleg Yankovsky, 65, a charismatic and versatile actor who was one of Russia’s most beloved stage and screen stars, died Wednesday in a Moscow hospital after a battle with cancer, said a spokeswoman for Lenkom, the Moscow theater where the actor worked for decades.
Yankovsky’s film career spanned five decades and included leading roles in many movies that endure as icons for millions across the former Soviet Union.
He was little-known in the West, but one of his last movie roles was as a religious leader and foe of Ivan the Terrible in Russian director Pavel Lungin’s film “Tsar,” screened this month at the Cannes Film Festival.
He also played leading roles in films of the brooding Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, including “Mirror” and “Nostalgia.”
Yankovsky was born in 1944 to an aristocratic family exiled to Kazakhstan under dictator Josef Stalin in the 1930s.
He was honored as a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union and had been decorated with three Russian Order of Service to the Fatherland medals since the Soviet collapse in 1991.
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