He studied with Georgy Tovstonogov and as a "green student" was familiar with many eminent people of the creative literary and acting environment. He raved about the theater from a young age. It was boring for him to live, by his own admission, but it was not boring to put on performances. All this is about Kama Ginkas, who has been continuing to amaze his audience for half a century.
Birth
By nationality, Kama Ginkas - you can guess this only by name - a Jew. A nation as a nation, no better or worse than others. However, everyone knows how the Jews were treated in the middle of the last century, especially during the Great Patriotic War. Namely, before the war, Kame had to be born, having already known persecution and troubles as a tiny baby.
Happy event in the life of his family happened on May 7, 1941. The Lithuanian Kaunas became the hometown of the future director. The father of little Kama, Monya (another option is Miron), was a doctor. At one time he graduated from the Kaunas Medical Institute. Kama Ginkas himself later, in his memoirs about his childhood and his father, said that he partially followed in the footsteps of his father - he was the boss, and Kama became the boss. True, in differentareas - Kama in the theater, and his father - in an ambulance. However, this happened a little later - after the war. And then, in the forty-first, six-week-old Kama, just a baby, was driven into the Kaunas ghetto together with his parents. There they stayed for a long year and a half. Kama, of course, does not remember anything about this time. What he knows, he knows only from the stories of his parents.
A year and a half later, the Ginkas family managed to escape. Kama Ginkas does not know exactly when this happened, he only knows that the escape took place on the thirteenth - his mother loved the number thirteen all her life for this very reason. At the end of March 1944 in the Kaunas ghetto there was a brutal removal (and, of course, murder) of children. The Ginkas had escaped shortly before.
For some time they hid with Lithuanian friends who agreed to give them shelter. Usually the Lithuanians betrayed the Jews, but that family could be trusted. Kama recalled that the silver spoon that he saw in this house sunk into his soul very much. Apparently, it was a real shock for the kid to hold a silver spoon in his hands after the horrors of the ghetto.
Introduction to the theater
Even at the age of five, little Kama knew for sure: an artist is the most wonderful profession. The artist wows the audience! And Kama wanted to "shake". He decided that he would certainly become an artist. Kama had his own puppet theater, he did some home productions. And when he was fifteen, he first appeared in what was then Leningrad - he went to visit Aunt Sonya, his father's sister. Apart fromwalking through the streets and museums of the city on the Neva, young Kama had a chance to visit one of the performances of the legendary Georgy Tovstonogov. The teenager was shocked and even more strengthened in the desire to become an actor.
Try number one
After graduating from high school in Kaunas, Kama Ginkas went straight to the admissions committee of the acting department at the Vilnius Conservatory. He was confident in himself - the words that his external data did not correspond to his internal ones became the greater blow for him. In other words, Kama was not taken. Then he considered that the matter was in appearance, not realizing that by nature he was simply not an actor.
In such frustrated feelings, Kama Ginkas literally on the same days met his school teacher, with whom he once staged sketches in amateur performances. After listening to the resentment of the former student, the teacher advised him to enter the directing department in Leningrad. Such an option Kame never came up with, but - why not try? And without thinking twice, he went to the northern capital.
Try number two
Ginkas arrived in Leningrad completely unprepared. What kind of directors will be accepted, what needs to be learned, what knowledge to have from history, literature - Kama did not know about anything like that. But by some miracle, the master Georgy Tovstonogov passed the first three competitive stages.
And at the last - a colloquium, where it was required to be savvy in various humanitarian fields - he was cut off. However, by that time,fall in love with both Tovstonogov and directing. Kama returned home knowing that sooner or later he would become a director.
Try number three
Kama was going to apply exclusively to Tovstonogov, and therefore there were three long years of preparation ahead. The father, who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps, insisted on Kama entering the medical school, but Kama showed obstinacy. This caused some aggravation in relations with his father, which worsened in the future - after all, Kama nevertheless entered the acting department. The director himself recalled in an interview that his father then stung him with words about the admission of his classmates to a prestigious architectural institute, and in spite of Kam’s father, who always had “not very good” with the drawings, he also decided that he would enter the architectural one. He prepared, worked as a copyist of drawings, despite the fact that he was never fond of architecture. So he entered the architecture, but at the same time he went to the acting. Of course, he chose the latter. There he studied for the three years that remained before entering Tovstonogov. And the father did not talk to his son all this time.
After three years, Kama Mironovich Ginkas reappeared on the threshold of his aunt's house in Leningrad. With such a mood, which, in his own words, he never had again - on the rise, as they say. With this mood, he went to the institute, went through all the competitive rounds and was enrolled in the directing department of Georgy Tovstonogov - where he aspired to. It was there, by the way, at the exams, that his fateful meeting with his future wife took place,Henrietta Janowska. However, we will talk about this in more detail later.
After college
After graduation - and this happened in 1967 - Kama Mironovich Ginkas (pictured), by his own admission, was unemployed for some time. As, however, and his wife. They lived in poverty, but together. And in the same sixty-seventh year, Kame was lucky. He staged a play based on one of Viktor Rozov's plays at the Riga Drama Theatre. After that, the young director began a period of active creative activity.
For three years he worked in Leningrad, and in the seventieth year he left for distant Siberia, to Krasnoyarsk. Over the next two seasons, Kama was the chief director of the local Theater for Young Spectators, and his performances invariably enjoyed great success with the townspeople. From the very beginning of his career, the performances of Kama Ginkas and himself began to be called sharp. The master – and now Ginkas can be called that way – adheres to a similar manner of directing to this day.
Moscow
In the early eighties, director Kama Ginkas rightly decided that Moscow gives more opportunities to a creative person, and he and his family moved to the capital of our Motherland. Over the next seven years, Ginkas changed several stages - he was the head of the Mossovet Theater, "directed" on the stage of the Art Theater, was the "conductor" of the Mayakovsky Theater. But since 1988, the capital Youth Theater burst into his life, and Ginkas is still faithful to him.
The merit of Kama Mironovich can rightly be called what he brought, in essence, a children's theater, an element of "adulthood": on the stage of the Youth Theater there are now not only red riding hoods and rippled chickens, you can also see Kama's wonderful performances there Mironovich Ginkas after Dostoevsky or Chekhov, Wilde or Shakespeare. Kama's wife Henrietta works with him, and this is truly a wonderful creative tandem.
Recognition
As mentioned above, Ginkas is called a "sharp" director, and this, of course, is not liked by everyone. However, Kama Mironovich has his admirers, and there are also enough awards. Among them are the Stanislavsky Prize, the Tovstonogov Prize, the State Prize of Russia, as well as the title of People's Artist received fifteen years ago.
Private life
As mentioned above, Kama Ginkas met his wife Henrietta Yanovskaya when he entered the director's department. They passed exams together and even played each other in etudes, entered together and then never parted. We got married while still students. It's just that once Ginkas went home for the holidays, he realized that he felt bad without Yanovskaya.
The director himself says that with his wife they - like Sacco and Vanzetti, together in the same electric chair, share everything that happens in life in half. Perhaps this is the secret of their family happiness. The couple directors have two sons - Donatas and Daniel. And nine or ten grandchildren. As Ginkas joked in an interview, there's no way they can figure out the exact number.
This is the biography of Kama Ginkas, a wonderful director and just a good person.
