Yevgeniy Yevstigneyev

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevstigneyev (; 9 October 1926 — 4 March 1992) was a prominent Soviet and Russian stage and film actor, theatre pedagogue, one of the founders of the Moscow Sovremennik Theatre. He was named People's Artist of the USSR in 1983 and awarded the USSR State Prize in 1974. Early years Yevgeny Yevstigneyev was born on 9 October 1926 in Nizhny Novgorod, Russian SFSR (modern day Nizhny Novgorod Oblast of Russia) into a poor working-class family and spent his childhood at the outskirts in the Volodarsky village. He was a late child of Maria Ivanovna Yevstigneyeva (née Chernishova), a milling machine operator, and a metallurgist Aleksandr Mikhailovich Yevstigneyev who was twenty years older than her and who died when Yevgeny was six years old. Maria Ivanovna married another man who died when Yevgeny turned seventeen. By that time he had already finished seven classes of secondary school and applied as a mechanic to the same factory where his mother was working. Yet he dreamed of acting, just like his elder half-brother who served as a comedy actor in the local theatre and died very young, which made his mother to believe that it was a bad sign; she asked the recruiting manager to keep her son's documents and don't let him leave. During that period Yevgeny became interested in jazz and started playing drums with a jazz band that performed in cinemas. There he was noticed by the director of the Gorky Theatre School (known as Y. A. Yevstigneyev Theatre School of Nizhny Novgorod today) who invited him to join. Yevgeny passed the entering exams in 1947 and graduated in 1951.