Actor's stories: funny incidents from the life of Alexander Shirvindt

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

July 19 marks 82 years of the remarkable theater and film actor, theater director and screenwriter Alexander Shirvindt … Everyone knows his brilliant sense of humor, equanimity and philosophical and ironic attitude to life. During filming and touring, the actor often found himself in curious situations, many of which he created himself.

Director Mark Zakharov often witnessed how Shirvindt brought people laughing at his jokes to a semi-faint state - he could improvise for a long time and always with the same effect: people laughed to tears. Zakharov says that Shirvindt's accidentally thrown phrases can then be told like anecdotes. They themselves, too, often became the heroes of such anecdotes, which, however, did not seem funny to everyone. When their friend Andrei Mironov married Ekaterina Gradova, Zakharov and Shirvindt threw bricks and a portrait of Lenin into the suitcases of the newlyweds who were going on their honeymoon to Leningrad, and watched with undisguised joy as Mironov with great difficulty dragged the suitcases into the compartment. Mironov appreciated the joke, but his wife was not happy.

When Andrei Mironov married Larisa Golubkina, friends again presented him with an original wedding gift. Mark Zakharov recalls: “I just read from one classic that American cowboys always spent a long time preparing for jokes on the wedding night of their beloved friend. We did not specially prepare, but in a rather large company we set off at night by car towards the dacha, where Andrei and Larisa retired. At first, we cautiously depicted night ghosts, howling around the house with the turned off windows. When physical exhaustion came without any visible changes at the dacha, Shirvindt showed great ingenuity, unforgettable for the rest of my life. He silently climbed through the window into the bedroom and bit Larisa Ivanovna on the heel. For some reason, Larisa Ivanovna did not like it terribly. Why is a mystery to me …”.

During the filming of E. Ryazanov in the film "The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!" the actors made a real brawl: the "bath scene" was filmed at night in the cold corridor of Mosfilm, and to keep warm, Alexander Shirvindt, Andrey Myagkov, Georgy Burkov and Alexander Belyavsky brought a bottle of vodka with them and replaced them with props bottles of water. And the beer in the shot was real. After the first take, the actors felt an unprecedented rise and inspiration. After the third take, their overly plausible intoxication became noticeable to the entire creative group, Ryazanov flew into a rage and stopped filming. The next day, the actors played the same scene while sober. But the film ended up incorporating footage from the first night.

In a similar way, the actors warmed themselves on the set of the film Three Men in a Boat, Excluding a Dog: they had to sit in a boat for hours in their bathing suits, the film was filmed closer to autumn, Shirvindt, Derzhavin and Mironov were constantly freezing. In the water behind the boat, the actors were insured by divers who supplied them with warming drinks. Vodka was poured into a copper kettle and sipped from a spout, convincing director Naum Birman that they were warming themselves with boiled water.

Curiosities also happened during performances. One day, Shirvindt played the role of an elderly rake who took his mistress's son through the dark places all night and, as a result, lost him somewhere. The lady pounced on him with accusations, her monologue ended with the words: "Where is my son?" The actress made a reservation and said: "Where is my cheese?"With his usual equanimity, Shirvindt immediately replied: "I ate it!"

For this equanimity, Andrei Mironov called his friend "The Iron Mask". To finally surprise him, the friends decided to play Shirvindt. Mark Zakharov and Andrei Mironov accompanied him to the station - he was leaving for shooting in Kharkov, and then they took plane tickets and arrived there before him. But there was still no emotion on Shirvindt's face. He just uttered: "Good!". And later he confessed to Zakharov: "When I heard your voices in the morning, I still thought terrible to myself: I need to drink less."

In the acting environment, curious cases often occur, which are then told about invented anecdotes. Actor's tales: how Zinovia Gerdt let down a woman's ass