1. Nikolai Nikolaevich Gubenko was a Soviet and Russian actor, film and theatre director, screenwriter, founder of the Community of Taganka Actors theatre.
17 Facts About Nikolai Gubenko
1. 2.
Nikolai Gubenko's movie Wounded Game was entered into the 1977 Cannes Film Festival.
3.
Nikolai Gubenko was named People's Artist of the RSFSR in 1985.
4.
Nikolai Gubenko served as the last Minister of Culture of the USSR and as the Russian State Duma deputy between 1995 and 2003.
5.
Nikolai Gubenko was born in the Odessa Catacombs during the Defence of Odessa, the youngest of five children.
6.
Nikolai Gubenko's father joined the Soviet Air Forces before Nikolai was born and was killed in action near Voroshilovgrad.
7.
Around 1960 Nikolai Gubenko arrived in Moscow and passed the entering exams for the acting department of VGIK, the course led by Sergei Gerasimov and Tamara Makarova which he finished in 1964.
8.
The final cut was released only in 1965, when Nikolai Gubenko had already graduated.
9.
Nikolai Gubenko played Adolf Hitler in his diploma play based on Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.
10.
Nikolai Gubenko's performance turned so powerful that Yuri Lyubimov who visited the play immediately made him an offer to join the Taganka Theatre, even though Gubenko had studied to be a film actor.
11.
Nikolai Gubenko served there from 1964 until the end of the 1960s when he decided to dedicate himself to cinema and entered director's courses at VGIK, led by Gerasimov and Makarova, which he finished in 1970.
12.
Nikolai Gubenko's 1976 Wounded Game was based on his own original screenplay.
13.
In 1987 Nikolai Gubenko returned to the Taganka Theatre following the death of Anatoly Efros.
14.
Nikolai Gubenko headed it, started resurrecting old plays and at the same time used all his influence to help Yuri Lyubimov return to the USSR.
15.
Nikolai Gubenko was offered the seat of the Minister of Culture of the USSR, becoming the first Soviet arts professional to hold a similar post since Anatoly Lunacharsky in 1917.
16.
Nikolai Gubenko served from 1989 to 1991 when the dissolution of the Soviet Union occurred, and so he was the last Soviet Minister of Culture.
17.
At one point he attended a meeting and got into an argument with Nikolai Gubenko who took the side of the protesters and was fired.