A driver, a sailor, a worker, a Red Army soldier, a punk, a shopkeeper… You can list the roles played by Alexander Lebedev, an actor who is considered a recognized master of the episode, for a long time. Infrequently he had the luck to play the main role. Often his name was in the credits on the last lines, or even not mentioned at all. Nevertheless, the viewer knows the actor Alexander Lebedev well: is it a joke - 160 roles!
The beginning of the creative path
Alexander Ivanovich was born on the eve of 1930, December 26, in the city of Voskresensk, Moscow Region. There is almost no information about the childhood of the future actor, it is known that during his school years he studied in a drama club, and then went to Moscow to enter VGIK. The short guy did not impress Sergei Gerasimov, who was gaining a course, but his wife Tamara Makarova liked him. And although the young man was not accepted into the cinema institute, according to a note from Makarova, Lebedev was invited by Olga Pyzhova to the Central Children's Theater. Here the young man played the main role in the sensational performance based on the play by Sergei Mikhalkov "I want to go home." The debut turned outtriumphant. At the same time, Alexander studied at the State Institute of Theater Arts (GITIS), on the course of Pyzhova. Lebedev graduated with honors at the age of 23.
First roles
The creative biography of actor Alexander Lebedev continued to work at the Theater for Young Spectators, where the artist delighted the children for a year. Around the same time, Lebedev became an employee of the Mosfilm film studio. Since then, the cinematic stage has become the home of the actor Alexander Ivanovich Lebedev until the end of his life, and the cinematic fate takes precedence over the theatrical fate.
The first role of the young actor was the episodic image of a mischievous sailor in Mikhail Kalatozov's film "True Friends". The film was a great success with the audience, Lebedev began to be recognized on the streets of Moscow by sight. At the same time, the actor starred in the Swedish Match film, in the episodic role of a shopkeeper in a remote provincial town where nothing happens, and local figures grab every opportunity to stir up the sleepy, uninteresting life of the population. “We have everything!”, - his hero helpfully responds to the question of whether there are matches. Lebedev manages in one sentence to instantly sketch a portrait of a clever swindler who knows his own advantage.
Such different roles
In 1955, the Gorky film studio releases a film based on the work of the same name by Arkady Gaidar "The Fate of a Drummer". Alexander Lebedev gets the role of the bully Kovyakin. The actor brilliantly copes with the task of embodying a negative character on the screen.
In 1956Alexander Alov and Vladimir Naumov created the first version of the film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Nikolai Ostrovsky "How the Steel Was Tempered". Actor Alexander Lebedev got not the main, but a significant supporting role. He played the Red Army soldier Nikolai Okunev. However, Lebedev did not make it into the film about Pavka Korchagin, which was directed by Nikolai Mashchenko and directed by Alov and Naumov in 1975.
Lebedev's comedic gift was revealed in Alexander Row's musical film "A Precious Gift". Alexander appeared before the audience in the role of a young man Petit, the son of a rollicking fishing lover Karp Sidorenko, for whom loving children and a nephew decided to hook a big pike as a present.
In the historical-revolutionary Soviet film "Storm" Alexander Lebedev created the ideological image of a convinced Red Army soldier.
In Andrey Tutyshkin's comedy "To the Black Sea" Lebedev again has an episode - the role of a driving school cadet, where the main character learns to drive a car in order to go on vacation at sea.
Main role
In 1959, in the Mosfilm musical short film, young actor Alexander Lebedev was lucky enough to star in the title role, as it turned out, the only one in his entire career. The charismatic hero of Lebedev appears in the first shots with a guitar in his hands, sings, dances, jumps over a rope and plays hopscotch without letting go of the string instrument from his hands. This character is at the center of a fun story about the creation of a courtyard orchestra.
Small roles of the bigactor
Humor, tragedy, eccentricity, ardent conviction - it seems that Alexander Lebedev's cinematic gift was subject to everything. He created an image of a person from life, familiar and understandable to every viewer. Someone fell in love with him in the role of a policeman in "Gentlemen of Fortune", someone hated his gangster Genka in "Born Revolution", and someone felt sorry for the soldier from "Eternal Call" to tears, whose fate broke with a shot arm - he was a carpenter. The audience remembered both the pioneer leader in the film “My Friend Kolka”, and the driver Osin in the drama “Hot Snow”, and Arkhip from the film “The Sun Shines on Everyone”, and other images of the cinematic biography of the actor Alexander Ivanovich Lebedev, which he created with incredible accuracy and persuasiveness.
The artist embodied the last roles in serials. Until the age of 75, directors invited him to film sets, knowing that every time the image created by the artist would be remembered by the audience and give the tape a special, vital flavor. Housemates, meeting Lebedev on his daily walk, were interested in where their beloved "Sashka" was filmed now, as pensioners called him.
Misfortune
Judging by the biography, the personal life of actor Alexander Lebedev was not as happy as on stage and in the movies. It so happened that he began to get sick often and severely. The habitual good nature left the old man. There was some kind of confusion at Mosfilm, which is why the honored actor stopped receiving a supplement to his small pension. In addition, in the hands of the sick Alexander Lebedev was a wife, bedridden with a serious illness, and a daughter, who was registered in a psychoneurological dispensary. Employees of the social service came to the Lebedevs. By the time the misunderstanding with the pension supplement was resolved, the artist was gone.
Tragic circumstances
“The King of the Episode” died at the age of 82, the cause of death of actor Alexander Lebedev doctors could not establish, because at the time of death neither doctors nor police were around. Due to mental illness, Lebedev's daughter Tamara did not tell anyone about her father's death, the body of the deceased lay at home for several days. The Russian Cinema Actors Guild only became aware of the death of the artist on the 11th day. Tamara did not agree to give the deceased to the morgue for a long time, and when the door was broken and the corpse was taken away, the woman did not give any documents or consent to the burial. The body of the famous artist lay in the morgue for more than a month, then was cremated. Lebedev's wife, Anna, survived her husband by two months. The couple were buried together in a columbarium at the Domodedovo cemetery.
Family Circle
It is known that neither the wife nor the daughter of Alexander Lebedev were associated with creative professions. Tamara received a technical education and worked as an accountant before something happened to her mind in the mid-90s. Having her own apartment, the daughter spent all her time at her parents' house. Anna, the wife of Alexander Lebedev, worked as a house painter. The disease deprived the woman of the opportunity to help Alexander Ivanovich,when he started having problems with his legs. So three unhe althy people coexisted in a closed space, whose life, once bright and eventful, was reduced to a daily battle with the disease.
The unique creative manner of Alexander Lebedev, his extraordinary capacity for work made this wonderful actor one of the most famous movie personalities of the Soviet era.
