Actor Vladimir Samoilov.
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS
Vladimir Samoilov was among the boys who graduated from school in 1941 and immediately volunteered for the front. All youth is just war, hard, painful, terrible. He spent his childhood in Odessa, near the Black Sea. There, according to one version, he was born, although sometimes they say that he was born in the village of Egorovka, Odessa region, the birthplace of his mother Evdokia. My father was a mechanic on a long-distance ship.
Afterwards he didn’t talk about the war, he didn’t like it. She said she struggled like everyone else. He was a mortarman and gunner. Only a couple of episodes are known that Samoilov often remembered in his family. The first is this: there was a transition from the Vistula to the Oder. The total length of the route is about five hundred kilometers. And Samoilova had to drag the base plate of the mortar to the end. I can’t imagine this power. Apparently, Samoilov himself could barely understand what tests he had undergone, so he shared this story with his son.
Another incident almost cost him his leg. Samoilov was wounded while fighting for Breslau. Shrapnel hit his leg and the doctors almost gave up on the soldier and decided to amputate him. But the future actor did not dare to do this. He also suffered shock, so he could not give an explanation for his subsequent actions, but it is known with certainty that the injured man took crutches and headed to the Winter River. There he freed her sore, bandaged leg and immersed it in ice water. It was very cold and terribly painful, Samoilov shouted, but he could not reach his leg. The next day, the surgeon saw that the swelling had subsided, gangrene was no longer a threat, and the patient did not need amputation. The limp remained forever, but her friends joked that without it it would be difficult to observe such perfection up close.
He was handsome in a special masculine sense and not at all sweet. He chose his wife once and for all, and for her he chose her profession. Nadenka really wanted to become an actress and she set a condition for her boyfriend: either we go to the theater together or there will be no wedding. Well, in the theater like that in the theater. This is how a male and female student appeared at the Odessa Theater School.
1980 Scene from the play “Running”. People’s Artist of the RSFSR Vladimir Yakovlevich Samoilov as Korzukhin. Photo: Mikhail Strokov/TASS Photo Chronicle
It’s a strange situation: she desperately wanted to play on stage, but he was the one who achieved success. And the point is not that Nadezhda Samoilova was deprived of talent or a brilliant appearance. She had it all. And her character was quite dominant: only she could “line up” her husband in such a way that her friends would obediently fall into line. The legendary story of the filming of “The Wedding in Malinovka” is proof of this, but we will talk about it later. Only Nadezhda, who in her youth strove to achieve success as an actress, realized the uniqueness of the person she was close to. And when Samoilov passed away in 1999, she was not long for this world. She simply became ill and died that same fall. She was buried next to her husband, in Vagankovsky.
Vladimir Samoilov was especially memorable in “Wedding in Malinovka.” There is a certain injustice in this: the theater stage has constantly shown that he is a great dramatic artist, fantastically organic in classic tragic roles. And it turns out that the operetta made him famous… It is true that “The Wedding in Malinovka” was a very popular work even before filming. It was performed in musical theaters all over the country and they joked that there was not a single day in which “The Wedding in Malinovka” was not shown in at least one city of the USSR. The radio play was also broadcast several times, so the audience knew many of the dialogues and songs by heart. Director Andrei Tutyshkin prepared to shoot a film version as the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution approached, and for the anniversary they decided to storm Malinovka on a large scale.
Valentina Lysenko and Vladimir Samoilov on the set of “Wedding in Malinovka.”
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS
Filming took place near Poltava, the actors lived in huts. Samoilov was placed alongside Slichenko, Pugovkin and Abrikosov, and so it began. Only Pugovkin did not drink: he had simply stopped drinking again. But nothing stopped the rest. As a result, the spree was terrible, with delays in filming, nervous breakdowns and hysteria on the part of the director.
Samoilov’s wife, Nadezhda Fedorovna, was called in to help. She arrived with her son and put things in order. It is true that she was not successful on the first attempt: it turned out that all the actors knew how to do guerrilla warfare. Since open drinking was no longer possible, an underground cell was organized around one of the garden tubs. There seemed to be water there, and everyone who washed with absolute impudence took moonshine from this gigantic fountain. But Nadezhda Fedorovna could not be fooled for long: she conducted a personal investigation and successfully disarmed the company. Andrei Tutyshkin sighed quietly and filming continued without incident.
The only negative: the love scenes between Samoilov and Lyudmila Alfimova suffered. It was not that Nadezhda Samoilova kept all the enthusiastic women away from her husband, but that the very fact of her presence influenced him. It took Alfimova a long time to kiss Samoilov well: she gives him a friendly kiss and looks around her. The elementary scene required a lot of taking and nerves. In the end, Samoilov took the initiative, took her partner in his arms and kissed her himself, with maximum ardor.
“Wedding in Malinovka” was released in 1967 and in one year was seen by 74 million people. Naturally, after such success, the face of Vladimir Yakovlevich was familiar to everyone. And then there were more roles, both main and non-main. Even in the not-so-cinema-friendly era of the 1990s, he acted in films. He rarely refused, so it is not surprising that after “Fathers and Sons”, “Sibiriyada” or the films “Shadows Disappear at Noon” and “Days of Turbines” very passable works appeared. But the main word here is work. Both in the theater and in front of the camera. About a hundred roles in films alone, many leading characters on the stage of the Mayakovsky Theater and, later, at the Gogol Theater…
He died as an actor. At 75 years old, during a rehearsal. He was preparing the premiere of “King Lear”, the main role belonged to Vladimir Samoilov. Unfortunately, no one ever saw this performance: heart attack, immediate departure. Between colleagues and Shakespeare’s text.
