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
People's Artist of the USSR, also sometimes translated as National Artist of the USSR, was an honorary title granted to artists of the Soviet Union. The term is confusingly used to translate two Russian language titles: Народный арти ...
in 1983 and awarded the
USSR State Prize
The USSR State Prize () was one of the Soviet Union’s highest civilian honours, awarded from its establishment in September 1966 until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. It recognised outstanding contributions in the fields of science, mathem ...
in 1974.
Early years
Yevgeny Yevstigneyev was born on 9 October 1926 in Nizhny Novgorod, Russian SFSR (modern day
Nizhny Novgorod Oblast
Nizhny Novgorod Oblast () is a federal subjects of Russia, federal subject of Russia (an oblast). Its administrative center is the types of inhabited localities in Russia, city of Nizhny Novgorod. It has a population of 3,119,115 as of the 2021 Ru ...
of
Russia
Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...
) into a poor working-class family and spent his childhood at the outskirts in the Volodarsky village.
[''Yevgeny Yevstigneyev and a collective of authors (2017)'']
I'm Alive...
— Moscow: AST, 288 pages He was a late child of Maria Ivanovna Yevstigneyeva (née Chernishova), a
milling machine operator, and a
metallurgist
Metallurgy is a domain of materials science and engineering that studies the physical and chemical behavior of metallic elements, their inter-metallic compounds, and their mixtures, which are known as alloys.
Metallurgy encompasses both the ...
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.
, 2004 (in Russian)
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.
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
today) who invited him to join.
Yevgeny passed the entering exams in 1947 and graduated in 1951.
He became an actor of the Vladimir Regional Drama Theatre where he served from 1951 to 1954. He quickly rose to fame as the most talented and versatile actor of Vladimir, performing 23 roles in total.
who had previously studied with Yevstigneyev returned for him and asked to join the
.