Inna Ulyanova in the film “Pokrovsky Gate”
We met her in the 90s, those gallants. She met me at the door of her apartment, not far from the Malaya Bronnaya theater, a woman with incredible posture and a welcoming smile. She is the welcoming one, when her face doesn’t look like a mask, she shines. The apartment had a spacious loggia, from which it was pleasant to look at the neighboring trees and it was also nice to take pictures against the backdrop of a yellowish brick wall. She then put on a samovar (in the Soviet Union many had samovars) and she began her performance almost solo in the theater for a spectator-listener. Inna Ivanovna Ulyanova played a cheerful woman giving an interview. Cookies, bagels, it seemed, a cozy round table, at which she sat for several minutes, then she jumped up and ran through the kitchen, to the buffet and back, where there were some things for tea .
As he ran, he talked and talked, simultaneously parodying everyone he was talking about. Then she shouted:
– Why don’t you, Valechka, eat cookies? – and I, remembering Margarita Pavlovna from “Pokrovsky Gates”, had a hard time holding back a joke on myself – they say, it’s good, at least not “Darling”. Although it would not be surprising. “Darling” became the calling card of the actress, and later Mikhail Kozakov, at one of the performances of his company “An Extraordinary Session”, instructed Inna Ivanovna to pronounce this word from the stage at the first appearance.
“Kozakov is a very competent director,” Inna Ulyanova later told me in that old interview, suddenly copying Kozakov’s way of squinting and gesticulating. – He always has everything in his head, he knows everything from beginning to end. Sometimes, however, he would get lost on stage and go from actor to director. He sees me on stage and says, “Total shit, total shit! Horrible!” I say: “Michal Mikhailovich, you understand that you are ruining my mood, that this is the first way out.” And he: “What can I do? It’s shit!” Sometimes he follows me, I think it’s about to start, and he: “Nothing, today is normal.”
“Darling” was also heard in an advertisement for a cleaning product in the 90s, where Inna Ivanovna burst into the apartments of housewives and actively convinced them of the benefits of “Comet”.
Yes, Pokrovsky Gate made her famous all over the country. Although there were previously surprisingly acted episodes in which she was forever remembered as “a girl whom two people try to kiss at once on “Carnival Night” or as “a woman with a fox”, saying with drunken pathos the phrase “in love, I am Einstein”! She called the lady with the fox “a small step towards fame”.
On the day of our meeting, she was not wearing a boa, it was summer, but years later she showed with great precision the gait with which she left Stirlitz in “Seventeen Moments” “to draw a couple of formulas.”
She told herself: “I love to work with joy. Otherwise, everything will be in vain: smiling, even though you are hysterical, is obvious.”
Her contract with the cleaning product manufacturers stated that she had no right to appear in any other commercials.
Actress Inna Ulyanova during the filming of the feature film “Pokrovsky Gate”
Photo: TASS photo chronicle.
“Nobody would believe me if I say that I get full creative satisfaction,” he said. “But this advertising filming system teaches you that within a minute you have to do everything possible to convince yourself to buy a product and be present at the same time as a living person. And the box has to be placed so that it can be seen. This teaches you to react quickly.”
I remember that she mentioned her husband’s reaction to the announcement (he asked to “turn this lady off”) and I asked her who she would prefer as a husband: Lev Evgenievich or Savva Ignatievich.
“Now, if only it were Savva Ignatievich’s hands…”, she laughed. – If you look at the ceiling of my house, you will understand that I miss Savva Ignatievich very much! But in the evening, over a cup of tea, I would prefer Lev Evgenievich. But that does not happen!
She went on to say that her current husband is a physicist, not a humanist, and once told her: “Your Hamlet is an aphid.”
This mythical husband was often mentioned in conversations, but the Internet was not full of gossip at that time, and only later I learned with interest that she lived very alone, and after his death there was the usual scandal over the housing issue, since they were not legal relatives there. She was married once – her marriage to Boris Goldaev, an actor and director, broke up in 1968. It lasted only two years. The reason for the divorce was stupid: Ulyanova saw Goldaev dancing with Anastasia Vertinskaya. Inna Ivanovna made a scandal, Goldaev packed his suitcase and left. Then Ulyanova tried to make peace, but to no avail. He even promised her a separate apartment, provided there was no divorce.
In general, she was accustomed to getting the best from birth. The daughter of the Deputy Minister of the Coal Industry of the USSR dressed luxuriously, and her family lived in the same house as the famous Ladynina and Makarova. She did not have to “survive”; everything was easy in everyday life. There was an au pair in the house, her father’s chauffeur took her to school, she did not have to do anything for herself except educate herself, read and learn her favorite French. And then adulthood came, and she no longer had the main role. Before the Pokrovsky Gates, the plays were small and the novels short.
There was only one romance that really touched her heart: with the French pilot Konstantin Feldzer. They corresponded for four years and, of course, called each other, alternating between Russian and French. He proposed to her and invited her to Paris, but she refused. As she herself said, she feared for the high position of her father. After the death of her pilot, she burned all of her letters.
Inna Ulyanova in the film “Carnival Night”
I will learn all this later, at the same time that Inna Ivanovna easily and cheerfully fed me dry bread and told me stories about her husband, who was not there at that time. Although she sometimes she would suddenly call random companions husbands if she appeared with them at all kinds of social events. So the roofs really needed the hands of “Savva Ignatievich” or at least money that could be invested in repairs. But she didn’t complain about it. She only complains about the lack of interlocutors:
– Dostoevsky wrote that “souls are decreasing,” and Stendhal wrote about the fact that there are fewer interlocutors. I collect good conversationalists. I have the habit of savoring words; sometimes I even smell them. And I can’t listen to the poorly recorded nonsense of a jellyfish. I’m out. And then, you see, I fall in love. I fall in love with people.
He died on June 9, 2005; The ambulance did not take her to the hospital. They talked about alcoholism, about the meanness of the neighbors, about the betrayal of a certain janitor or a notary: the housing problem ruined everyone. She almost didn’t live to see her birthday.
I remember she also told me that she compensates for her “Ulyanovsk pressure” with a complete lack of pressure in life.
“I had a monologue,” he admitted, “so I actually asked, ‘Can I shed a tear? ’ But they didn’t allow it. They want to see an eternal optimism that, as you can imagine, wears thin with age.”
