The revelations of the fate of the legendary actor, front-line soldier, director of Taganka, who crossed the 99-year line: Nikolai Dupak

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The older generation of TV viewers remember Nikolay Lukyanovich Dupak for numerous episodic roles in feature films - "Eternal Call", "Bumbarash", "Intervention", "Forty-first" and many others. For theatergoers, he is known as an actor, director and director who directed the famous "Taganka" for more than a quarter of a century. How the legend of Russian cinema and theater lives and looks now - in our publication.

Nikolai Lukyanovich Dupak - Soviet and Russian theater and film actor, theater director, theater director, as well as a front-line soldier and invalid of the Patriotic War. Honored Artist of the RSFSR (1980), Honored Artist of Ukraine (2012). The biography of this amazing person occupies a significant page in the national historical chronicle, as well as in the history of theatrical art and cinema.

Hungry childhood

Nikolai Lukyanovich was born on October 5, 1921 in the village of Starobeshevo, in the Donbas in a large Ukrainian family. Parents Luka Ilyich and Anna Artyomovna raised and raised five children. The family had to endure a severe famine that gripped Ukraine in the 1920s. And if not for the grandmother, who collected poppy heads in the steppe and fed her grandchildren with poppy seeds, the boy might not have survived. And once Kolya, the smallest of the children, choked on a poppy peel and did not suffocate a little. The father, grabbing the blue-faced and unconscious boy in his arms, ran through the whole village to the paramedic, who cut the trachea with a scalpel and extracted a piece of poppy husk from it. Nikolai Lukyanovich still wears this mark in the form of a scar on his neck. She is like a reminder: fate wanted him to survive.

A large family of Dupaks ended up in Donbass after the civil war, where their father received a plot of land with an area of 50 hectares in the village of Starobeshevo. Kolya's parents and older children worked the land from summer to summer, tirelessly: plowing the land, sowing, mowing, reaping, threshing grain. And already closer to the thirties, the family owned a good economy. They built their own barn, planted an orchard, erected a mill, acquired domestic animals and poultry.

However, the family did not manage to live in abundance for a long time. The thirties, terrible for prosperous peasants, came and abruptly turned their lives upside down. Among these there was also a large family of Dupaks., - from the memoirs of Nikolai Dupak.

Dispossession

Mass dispossession of kulaks began. The family of the future artist was taken on a cart to the railway station in Ilovaisk and loaded into a freight car along with other kulaks. The train moved northward and soon arrived in the Arkhangelsk region. In Konosha they were housed in a huge communal barrack located in a swampy forest area. Nikolai's father and other dispossessed peasants worked in felling. They procured materials for Donetsk mines. The time was cold and hungry, and there was no need to talk about the conditions of existence.

Return

After six months, the authorities allowed the evicted children who were not yet 12 years old to be taken away from Konosha. Thus, Kolya with his sister Liza ended up in the family of a father's friend in Starobeshevo. Kolya's mother was the first to return home with her older children, and his father later, with the help of friends, managed to escape. Returning to Donbass, fearing denunciation, he took his family and took them to Taganrog. There my father got a job as a pipe distributor at a local plant.

Towards an acting profession

At school, Nikolai studied diligently, and in his free time he took an active part in school and regional theatrical performances. He read poems and prosaic monologues well at various events dedicated to holidays and anniversary celebrations. In high school, he began to attend a drama club in the Taganrog Palace of Culture. And once, together with his older brother Grigory, he ended up in a culture park, where he toured the Moscow Meyerhold Theater. Kolya really liked how the artists played on stage. And from that day on, he knew exactly what he would become when he grew up.

In 1935, the talented young man was invited to the Taganrog Drama Theater for the role of Damis in the play "Tartuffe" based on the comedy play by Moliere. In this performance, Nikolai's debut appearance on the professional stage took place. Then the 14-year-old boy began to play in other productions of the Taganrog theater and became the owner of his own work book. Since the future artist studied in the Ukrainian language for seven years, he had to come to grips with studying the Russian language in order to perform on stage without an accent.

Inspired by his success in 1937, Nikolai Dupak entered the theater school in Rostov-on-Don, where he managed to unlearn for only three years. War burst into his life, as well as into the lives of millions of Soviet people.

And on the eve, in the spring of 1941, Nikolai Dupak successfully passed screen tests and was the only one from the entire school who was invited by Alexander Dovzhenko to play the role of Andrey in the feature film "Taras Bulba". However, the project was not destined to be realized. The first day of filming was scheduled for June 22, 1941 …

Military roads

Mass enrollment in the people's militia began. And 19-year-old student of the acting department Nikolai Dupak, together with Alexander Dovzhenko, volunteered for the militia near Novograd-Volynsky. Later, the young man ended up in the Novocherkassk cavalry school, from which he graduated with the rank of junior lieutenant. Since March 1942, Nikolai fought on the Bryansk Front in the Seventh Cavalry Corps, where he rose to the rank of guard lieutenant. In one battle, the cavalryman lost his faithful friend - a horse, who repeatedly saved him from death. Guards senior lieutenant, a participant in the defense of Moscow and Stalingrad, battles on other fronts, Nikolai Lukyanovich suffered two severe wounds and one concussion, lost his hearing and speech, after which in 1943 he received a disability and was discharged from the army. Has military orders and medals.

Creative biography

In 1944, Oleksandr Dovzhenko found Dupak and invited him to his new historical film "Ukraine on Fire", where Nikolai was supposed to play a hero-tanker. But Stalin did not like the script of the picture, and the shooting was banned. For the first time on the big screen, Nikolai Dupak appeared in the same year, only in the film "One Night", in which he played Lieutenant Sanya Sannikov.

Then for 20 years Nikolai Lukyanovich served as a leading actor and director of the K. S. Stanislavsky. Behind him are dozens of staged performances and more than 90 theatrical roles played. From 1963 to 1990 he was the director of the Taganka Theater. Working as the chief director of this theater, Nikolai Lukyanovich, in principle, so as not to use his official position, forever abandoned roles in Taganka's performances. In the cinema, he continued to work, starring in dozens of films.

The filmography of the actor is about 70 film roles. One of his last film roles was Lift Force (2014), and in the theater after the play Days of the Turbins (1958), Dupak played in only one production in 2012 - The Cherry Orchard.

With the direct participation and active assistance of Nikolai Lukyanovich on Taganka, the cultural center-museum of Vladimir Vysotsky, the House of Russian Abroad named after A. I. Solzhenitsyn and other significant objects in the countries of near and far abroad were built.

According to the memoirs of theater expert and journalist Ella Mikhaleva, the profession of director of the Taganka Theater was, to put it mildly, difficult: And all this was more than successful for Nikolai Lukyanovich Dupak. As they say, he was a leader from God.

Personal life

But Nikolai Lukyanovich kept his personal life under seven locks. Therefore, there is not so much information. It is only known that the first time he married in 1939, back in Rostov-on-Don, to the young actress Alla Yurievna Vannovskaya. When the war began, she and the theater were in evacuation in the deep rear. And it so happened that the husband from the front did not wait …

After the war, she moved with her relatives to Armenia, worked at the Yerevan Russian Drama Theater, where she rose to the rank of Honored Artist of the Armenian SSR. She got married several times. Including became the first wife of Armen Borisovich Dzhigarkhanyan, from whom she gave birth to a daughter, Elena. Her life ended tragically, after parting with the actor. The woman became addicted to alcohol, ended up in a psychiatric clinic and, at 46, committed suicide.

After the war, Nikolai Lukyanovich lived alone for several years until he met Vera Vasilyevna Chapaeva (Kamishkertseva), the youngest adopted daughter of the legendary divisional commander Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev. The couple lived in marriage for twenty years. But, unfortunately, Vera Vasilievna could not have children, which led to a divorce.

They lived with their third wife, Raisa Mikhailovna, for more than forty years. The woman fell seriously ill and died in 2009 as a result of a medical error. They say the truth: The trouble does not go alone. Literally a year later, daughter Elena and granddaughter Anastasia died tragically. The second daughter Oksana Nikolaevna, an actress and theater director, lives in Moscow with her grandson Adriano.

Afterword

I would like to finish the story about this amazing man, warrior, actor with the words of the pilot-cosmonaut Georgy Mikhailovich Grechko: By the way, one of the minor planets is named after Nikolai Dupak.

The conclusion involuntarily suggests itself that Nikolai Lukyanovich has mutual love with Life … He is an incredibly interesting interlocutor, giving interviews to journalists, he can talk about his life in detail for a long time, he still quotes by heart whole dialogues from theatrical productions in which he played in his youth … And this is really amazing.

And we can only wish Nikolai Lukyanovich in six months to celebrate his 100th anniversary in the same health and cheerful mood.