The famous Soviet actor and director, the last Minister of Culture of the Soviet Union Nikolai Gubenko left a bright mark in the cultural life of the country. Now he works in the Moscow City Duma and runs the Commonwealth Theater, which he himself founded.
Birth
The biography of Nikolai Gubenko began on August 18, 1941 in Odessa, when my mother, along with other residents of the city, was hiding in the catacombs from the bombing of German aircraft.
His father served as a senior lieutenant in military aviation, was the flight engineer of the heavy front-line bomber TB-3. He fought from the very beginning of the war, more precisely from July 1941, and died a year later in an air battle over Lugansk.
Nikolai’s mother worked at Odessa Cracking Plant as the chief designer. By the beginning of the war, she was pregnant with her fifth child, Nikolai, in addition, her dependents were still very young children (three girls and a boy). She gave birth directly to the Odessa catacombs, where she was hiding with relatives and children from German air raids. When the Nazis occupied the city, Gubenko’s mother was offered to work as a translator in the commandant’s office, as she knew German well. After the refusal to cooperate with the fascist administration, the woman was hanged by Romanian soldiers.
Difficult childhood
After the death of their parents, compassionate neighbors dismantled the children, adopted and gave new names. The younger Kolya stayed with his grandfather and grandmother, the parents of his mother. Therefore, his family never had a common photo of children. In the biography of Nikolai Gubenko, very little is written about the personal life of that period.
They lived very hard, barely making ends meet, despite the fact that the grandfather did not shy away from any work. He was a simple man, could perform almost all the work associated with simple physical labor, could be both a carpenter and a roofer.
Desiring to somehow improve the life of the grandson, in 1947, the grandfather attached the St. George Cross to his chest and went to the draft board, taking his grandson with him. Once in the office of the military commissar, he said that the boy was the son of a deceased officer and asked to be sent to a military special school (in the post-war years, there were many of them open in the country). To demonstrate the ability of his grandson, he put Kolya in a chair and offered to read some poem. He loudly and with emotion recited an excerpt from Lermontov’s poem Borodino.
School years
After the first listening in the biography of Nikolai Gubenko, the military commissar identified his 5th orphanage, where he first ate his fill, after eating a surprisingly tasty borsch with sour cream.
A little later, the boy was transferred to the Suvorov School, in which high school students were taught several subjects in English. The school was a preparatory step for entering the Military Institute of Foreign Languages. Future translation officers were trained at this military educational institution, but, as it turned out later, the biography of Nikolai Gubenko turned out very differently.
A passion for acting was awakened early enough in him; at school, he had the nickname Artist. He got it after he jokingly sang right in the classroom "Laugh the clown". Nikolai began to engage in a school theater group, in the first production he got one of the roles, moreover, female.
First experiences
After graduating from college, Gubenko first entered the theater studio at the House of Actor, and later, in 1958, the Theater of the Young Spectator. At first he was a stage worker, later he was accepted into the auxiliary staff of the troupe, where he was involved in many productions. In one of the performances, he played nine roles at once.
In 1960, Gubenko entered the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography at the acting faculty, which he graduated in 1964; later, he also did not study directing, and in both cases, his teachers were Tamara Makarova and Sergey Gerasimov.
The first cinematic role in the creative biography of Nikolai Gubenko was in Marlen Khutsiev’s film “Ilyich Outpost”, where he played one of the main characters - Kolya Fokin. All noted the mature game of Gubenko, the ambiguous simplicity, organicity and authenticity of the image. In the year of graduation, three more paintings were released with his participation.
He was sent to work at the Taganka Drama and Comedy Theater, whose main director was Yuri Lyubimov. Gubenko immediately received the main role of pilot Young Song in the play based on the works of B. Brecht "Good man from Cezuan." He was busy in many productions, and he played more than the main characters, but could appear in secondary images. In 1967, after playing the main role in the play "Pugachev", despite the tremendous success, he decided to leave the theater and focus on the cinema.
Master of cinema
By that time, he had not acted in films for two years, so he began to take on any roles, even episodic ones, but nevertheless, in the creative biography of Nikolai Gubenko, they were mainly the main ones. In 1967, he was offered three big roles, and the image of Blucher in the adventure film "Password is not needed" was recognized by critics. Then there were the films “The Noble Nest”, “Golden Gate” and “Director”. The latter spoke about the director of the automobile plant, the prototype of which was I. Likhachev, founder of ZIL.
In 1975, Gubenko starred in cult Soviet films: "They Fought for the Homeland" by Sergei Bondarchuk and "I Ask the Words" by Gleb Panfilov.
In the director's biography of Nikolai Nikolayevich Gubenko there were six paintings. The best of them critics recognized the tape "Wounded" about the life of the orphanages after the war. He himself played one of the teachers named Krivoruchko, the prototype of which was one of his teachers at the Suvorov School. The film has collected many international awards.
From 1987 to 1989, he was the main director of the Taganka Theater, restored the most popular performances and contributed to the return of Yuri Lyubimov. However, the two directors became closely in the same troupe, the relationship between teacher and student greatly deteriorated. It got to the point that Gubenko was not allowed into the theater, although he played a major role in the play "Vysotsky." In October 1992, Gubenko created the Taganka Actors Theater.
At the sovereign service
In 1987, Gubenko joined the Communist Party, he became the seventh and last Minister of Culture of the Soviet country (1989-1991). After the declaration of independence of Russia, he continued his political career.
He was twice elected from the Communist Party as a deputy of the State Duma (1995-2003), where he was first deputy and then chairman of the Committee on Culture and Tourism.
Since 2009, Gubenko has been Deputy Chairman of the Moscow City Duma.
A bit about personal
Gubenko found out that he has three sisters and a brother only at sixteen, but they never became close people. After several short meetings, everyone dispersed to the then still common country (to Odessa, Donetsk, Kolyma and Moscow). Nikolai practically does not communicate with them.
While working at the Taganka Theater, when he first entered there, he had an affair with actress Zinaida Slavina. They played in the same troupe and lived together in a dorm room. This has always happened in the biography of actor Nikolai Gubenko: personal life and acting career were closely intertwined.
Further, he actually lived in a civil marriage with actress Inna Ulyanova. She played the role of Margarita Pavlovna in the popular film "Intercession Gate". Inna even introduced Nikolai to her high-ranking father, who worked as deputy minister. He blessed the relationship, and the young couple moved to Ulyanova’s chic apartment. True, they never formalized the relationship.
Family life
He never had children. On his personal life in a biography, Nikolai Gubenko wrote: "My family is small: I and Zhanna, and also friends and comrades from the theater."
In the late 70s, he married Zhanna Bolotova, People's Artist of the RSFSR. They are familiar from their student years when they studied together at VGIK. Then they crossed paths on the set more than once, but Jeanne then had an affair with Andron Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, which he described in his memoirs. Then she was briefly married to a cousin of Marina Vladi.
The couple starred a lot, then Nikolai began to combine shooting with the public service. He has traveled all over the country in recent years, but he considers the photos with his wife the best of his photos. In the biography and personal life of Nikolai Gubenko, everything has been going quietly and measuredly for many years.