Nikolay Olyalin

Nikolay Vladimiriovich Olyalin (; 22 May 1941 - 17 November 2009) was a Soviet-Ukrainian actor of Russian ethnicity. Biography Early life As a child, Olyalin took drama classes at school. On 1959, When his father sent him to a military academy in Leningrad, hoping that he would become an army topographer, Olyalin chose to study in the Leningrad State Institute of Theater, Music and Cinematography instead. After graduating at 1964, he joined the Krasnoyarsk Children's Theater, where - in spite of having tense relations with the director - he was considered the best comical actor among the cast. There, he met his wife, Nella, who was the second secretary of the local Komsomol. Olyalin made his debut on screen depicting a test pilot in the 1965 film Days of Flight. Afterwards, he received many invitations to play in other motion pictures, but the Theater manager never told him of those and threw them away. When a letter from the Mosfilm studio reached Krasnoyarsk, offering Olyalin the main role in Yuri Ozerov's Liberation, one of the couriers told him of the matter. He claimed to be sick, took a leave and boarded a flight to Moscow. The character of Captain Tzvetaev, which he portrayed in the five parts of Liberation, gained him fame throughout the Soviet Union.