Sergei Bondarchuk

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Sergei Feodorovich Bondarchuk (1920-1994) was a Soviet film actor, writer, and director. He was conscripted into the Great Patriotic War, and was discharged in 1946, after which he worked on films. He was president of the Union of Cinematographers from 1970 to 1986. His daughter Natalia Bondarchuk played the role of Hari in the Andrei Tarkovsky film Solaris, his other daughter Alyona Bondarchuk is also an actress, and his son Fyodor Bondarchuk directed the 2005 war film The Ninth Company.

Filmography (selected):
  • Dream Of A Cossack (1951, dir. Yuli Raizman) was his first starring role.
  • Taras Shevchenko (1952, dir. Alexander Alov, Vladimir Naumov, Igor Savchenko) won him the honor of People's Artist of the USSR.
  • Othello (1955, dir. Sergei Yutkevich) entered Cannes, and it was on the set of this film that Bondarchuk met his wife.
  • Destiny Of A Man (1959) was his directorial debut, and won him many awards.
  • War and Peace (1965-7) is his most famous film. A true epic, the film is about ten hours long, was released in four parts, and would have cost over a billion dollars in modern money. Bondarchuk not only directed, but starred as Pierre, and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film, one of the few Russian films to do so.
  • Waterloo (1970) was his first English-language film, and was a critical success but commercial failure.
  • They Fought For Their Country (1975)
  • Boris Godunov (1986) starred Bondarchuk as the tsar, his daughter Alyona as Princess Xenia, and his son Fyodor as Prince Fyodor.
Sergei Bondarchuk provides examples of the following tropes: