Nikolai Konstantinovich Cherkasov
Николай Константинович Черкасов
1903–1966
○ Emphysema and heart failure
The actor of transformation, whose profile is stamped on the Order of Alexander Nevsky
I have worked on the figure of Ivan the Terrible not only in film but on the stage, I have come to love this figure, and I believe our reworking of the scenario can be a correct and truthful one.
An actor who moved between the Alexandrinsky stage and Soviet cinema. As the lead of Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible he became the face of the state epic, and the range of his transformations, from Paganel to Don Quixote, earned him Stalin's remark that he was an actor who knew how to transform himself.
From Mariinsky extra to Alexandrinsky lead
Born in St. Petersburg in 1903, he worked at the Mariinsky Theatre from 1919 to 1922 as an extra and mime, and later recalled how much he had learned there in the years when Chaliapin was still on its stage. In 1933 he joined the Pushkin Drama Theatre in Leningrad, the former Alexandrinsky, and remained its actor until 1965, the year before his death.
He made his name in cinema in the late 1930s, playing Paganel in The Children of Captain Grant (1936), the aged professor Polezhaev in Baltic Deputy (1936) and Tsarevich Alexei in Peter the First (1937-1938). The transformation of a thirty-three-year-old into the seventy-five-year-old Polezhaev became his trademark. He joined the Bolshevik party in 1940 and sat as a deputy of the USSR Supreme Soviet from 1950 to 1958.
Nevsky and the Terrible: the face of the state
He played Prince Nevsky in Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938), which brought him a Stalin Prize in 1941. When the Order of Alexander Nevsky was instituted in 1942, the designer Telyatnikov, having no surviving portrait of the prince, engraved Cherkasov's profile on the medal: an actor's face became the design of a state decoration.
He then played Tsar Ivan in Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, receiving a Stalin Prize in 1946 for Part One (1944), but Part Two was banned by the Central Committee resolution of September 1946. On 26 February 1947 he was summoned to the Kremlin with Eisenstein to discuss reworking the film with Stalin, Molotov and Zhdanov, a meeting preserved as the Kremlin conversation on Ivan the Terrible; the title of People's Artist of the USSR was conferred on him the same day. The reworking died with Eisenstein, and Part Two was released only in 1958. On stage he had been playing the same Ivan in The Great Sovereign at the Pushkin Theatre since 1945.
Don Quixote and the last years
After the war he played the film director in Spring (1947) and the leads of the biographical films Mussorgsky and Alexander Popov, which brought further Stalin Prizes in 1950 and 1951, five in all. He published his memoir Notes of a Soviet Actor in 1953, played the old knight in Kozintsev's Don Quixote (1957), the defining role of his late years, and received the Lenin Prize in 1964 for the physicist Dronov in Everything Remains for the People (1963).
He died of emphysema and heart failure in Leningrad on 14 September 1966, remembered, along with the profile on the Nevsky medal, as the actor who embodied his era's standard that the most important quality of an actor is knowing how to transform himself.