People’s Artist of the RSFSR Natalia Gundareva.
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS
“THE LENS IN WHICH I FIT WAS NOT INVENTED”
Natalya Gundareva was magnificent in any role: empresses, judges, princesses, milliners, “mistresses of the orphanage”, Buzykin’s clever wife. But initially, in the 70s, she was remembered and loved for the roles of ordinary village women: the citizen Katya Nikanorova, a waitress in “Hello and Goodbye”, a woman who rents an apartment to a couple from the city unpainted in “Autumn”. She was extremely convincing in these images, despite the fact that she herself came from an urban family: both parents were engineers.
He was born in 1948 and grew up in a communal apartment on Taganka. In an interview she recalled: “My parents did everything possible for me. I respect them a lot. They never hit me, although, to tell the truth, they did not treat me on purpose. But they knew how to create a special atmosphere that did not allow injustice. I was always afraid of doing something wrong, because then my mother would think badly of me. And she also remembered that once her mother told her: the first word that she, Natasha, uttered in her life was “herself”.
And Gundareva herself decided that she would be an actress. To begin with, she was enrolled in the Theater of the Young Muscovite at the Palace of Pioneers. She later she entered the Shchukin school, despite the fact that her mother hoped that her daughter, like her, would become a civil engineer. Natasha actually worked for some time as a draftsman in the design bureau, but in the end she left for Pike.
On the set of the movie “Wounded Wounds”, 1976
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS
Then he recalled: “There were 247 people in one place. I still don’t understand how I was admitted to the third and final round of the creative contest… A thought comes to mind: you need to do something amazing to impress the commission. My closet was small. He wore a dress adorned with blue flowers. It turned into a huge flower bed: wherever you look, everywhere, towards the horizon, there is me. Eyelashes, eyebrows, cheeks, lips curled and painted. I am walking down the street and suddenly it is raining. In my opinion, such a rain has never happened in Moscow before. Streams of water washed my curls, my cheeks and, as it seemed to me, even the flowers on the dress… In this way, with the dress clinging to my body, I entered the school. I’m waiting for a call. I look: the guys around me are beautiful, the girls are all slender, and among them I am like a wet ball.
The selection committee was satisfied with everything, only a certain fullness of Gundareva, inherent in her from birth, was embarrassed. With this fullness, she suffered and struggled all her life. They say that before each shoot she tried to lose weight and that her diets were hard: she lost or gained weight as if by magic. She joked that a movie camera lens that could accommodate such a magnificent actress had not yet been invented (the joke was a bit bitter). They also say that she liked Thai pills. In the early 2000s, she finally lost weight dramatically, she underwent plastic surgery, became more beautiful, and was very satisfied. But, apparently, all this played a role in the stroke that happened to him in 2001 …
GREAT LOVE FOR THE THEATER ARTIST
“Mom cursed everything in the world when I went to the theater, because there was complete uncertainty,” recalled Natalya Georgievna. – [В конструкторском бюро] I already had 120 rubles of salary, and here the scholarship was 28 rubles, the increased one – 35, in the last year – 80 – I was a Vakhtangov scholarship holder. And there was no telling what would happen next. Of course, this did not cause much enthusiasm. My mother told me this: “I will feed you. And then you live on your 35 rubles. If you want, buy things with them, if you want, breakfast, lunch and dinner at school… It’s all your money. She had to earn extra money as a pioneer leader to make ends meet. Then, when they were allowed to give concerts, with the money it became easier.
2013, Theater Museum. Bajrushin. Exhibition dedicated to the 65th anniversary of actress Natalia Gundareva.
Photo: Mikhail FROLOV
And after graduating from the university, she was immediately accepted into the theater group. Mayakovsky, where she worked all her life. Director Andrei Goncharov first gave her episodes, and then further roles. And the teacher Gundareva, Evgenia Galkina, said in an interview with KP: “I know of her one great love that she carried from her all her life – her love for Goncharov. But they were both married and they understood that they could not be together. His feelings, experiences dotted with creativity. Natasha told me: “I love him very much, but I cannot become his wife. She struggled with her love, she suffered. Their relationship has always been a mystery.”
However, she married a completely different director, Leonid Kheifets, who starred her in the television play “The Precipice.” Because of her, he divorced his wife. But the marriage broke up after a few years.
“VERY TIMELY WE MET”
He entered the cinema easily and naturally, immediately attracting the attention of director Vitaly Melnikov. He was preparing to shoot his little masterpiece Hello and Goodbye. And Gundareva was offered the role of a waitress by the leading lady Lyudmila Zaitseva.
Scriptwriter Viktor Merezhko recalled the following: “Natasha is a very good actress. Her only drawback is that she is plump and has wide hips “(again, damn fullness!) Gundareva herself, running up to Melnikov and Merezhko, immediately told them:” No one will shoot me, I’m fat, my hips are wide, no one will accept it.” They chose her immediately.
Film “Winter Evening in Gagra”, 1985
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS
A few years later, she was just as easily approved for the first major role in her life in a movie – in the film “Sweet Woman.” After that, the public of the “Soviet Screen” named her the best actress of the year; it was something like the Soviet “People’s Oscar”. Thus came glory and national love. And literally every new movie only strengthens this love. “Injured animals”, “Autumn marathon”, “Citizen Nikanorova is waiting for you”, “Vacation in September”, “The hostel is planned for the lonely”, “Personal file of Judge Ivanova”, “Aelita, do not disturb the men”. … They remembered the extraordinary thoroughness of her in the work: she painted each role literally in sentences, explaining to herself in a notebook what was happening with the heroine and how to interpret the scene, she taught all the lines and monologues so that they would bounce off her . her teeth like tongue twisters, and only then did she begin to “color” them with her play on camera.
In the movie Once Upon a Time, 20 years later, she played a mother with many children and came across as surprisingly natural, even though she had no children in her life. At the time, she was the wife of actor Viktor Koreshkov, with whom she co-starred in Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, one of her best performances. The passion that developed between them on stage continued in her life. Fortunately, not with such deplorable results as Leskov’s, but still, both did not find much happiness in this marriage: Koreshkov began an affair with pop singer Valentina Ignatieva, and the relationship fell apart. However, according to another version, Gundareva herself began an affair with actor Sergei Nasibov. Or maybe it just all happened…
Only the third time she was lucky in her personal life – she met the actor Mikhail Filippov. In the memoir “Natasha”, published after her death, she wrote: “… It was in the summer, on tour in Chelyabinsk and Perm. Love didn’t come, didn’t sneak up, but hit us both. “We met just in time,” I said, although sometimes I was sad: how late! … When we met, you were already popular, many times laureate, many times best actress of the year. And I haven’t seen most of Your movies and couldn’t list Your titles, but I knew about Your freckles and was happy about it. In You, adult woman, miraculously lived a girl, a girl from the sandbox “…
Farewell of actress Natalya Gundareva at the Troekurovsky cemetery, 2005
Photo: Anatoly ZHDANOV
