Oleg Basilashvili

He was born to a family of mixed Russian, Polish, and Georgian origin.[3][4] He is half Russian.[5]

Oleg Valerianovich Basilashvili was born on 26 September 1934 in Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union. His father, named Valerian Basilashvili, was a director of the Moscow Polytechnical College. His mother, named Irina Ilyinskaya, was a teacher of linguistics.[6]

His father made up a humorous story that his grandfather had once arrested a dangerous criminal named Dzhugashvili, who was really Joseph Stalin. In reality Basilashvili's maternal grandfather was a Russian Orthodox priest and an architect, who participated in the construction of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. During the World War II, young Oleg Basilashvili was evacuated from Moscow to the Transcaucasian republic of Georgia. There he went to a primary school and lived with his paternal grandfather until the end of World War II.[7]

In 1956, Oleg Basilashvili graduated from the Acting School of the Moscow Art Theatre, where he had studied under Pavel Massalsky. His group had many actors who would achieve fame in the future: among his fellows were Yevgeny Yevstigneyev, Mikhail Kozakov and Tatiana Doronina, his first wife. Together with Doronina, Basilashvili joined the troupe at the Bolshoi Drama Theater (BDT) in Leningrad under the leadership of the legendary director Georgy Tovstonogov. Since 1959 Basilashvili has been a permanent member of the troupe at the BDT in St. Petersburg. There his stage partners were such stars as Kirill Lavrov, Tatiana Doronina, Alisa Freindlich, Lyudmila Makarova, Svetlana Kryuchkova, Zinaida Sharko, Valentina Kovel, Innokenty Smoktunovsky, Oleg Borisov, Pavel Luspekayev, Sergei Yursky, and many other remarkable Russian actors. Basilashvili's most memorable stage works were in the play Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov, Kholstomer based on the eponymous story of Leo Tolstoy, The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky, and other classic plays directed by Tovstonogov.

Oleg Basilashvili shot to fame with his roles in films by director Eldar Ryazanov.[8] They collaborated in such popular films as Office Romance (1977), Station for Two (1982), Promised Heaven (1991), and Prediction (1993), which became significant box-office hits.

One of his most well-known film roles is the protagonist of Georgiy Daneliya's Autumn Marathon (1979). The film is a cross-genre comedy and melodrama with a bitter humor and satire of the Soviet life. Basilashvili plays a weak-willed man in his mid-life crisis, who is torn between two nice women, his wife and his mistress, and all three of them become entangled in the game of lies and personal demands, being at the same time strangled by the stagnant Soviet reality. The film became a Soviet classic, and premiered at the 1979 San Sebastián Film Festival. [9]

In the 1980s he appeared in eccentric films by Karen Shakhnazarov. Those were Kurer (Courier) (1987), Gorod Zero (Zero City) (1988), and Sny (Dreams) (1993). Dreams, a wild comedy about Perestroika is especially remarkable: in it Basilashvili tried on several images, those of a noble count from the past, a pornographer and a rock star.

In 2001, Oleg Basilashvili starred in Karen Shakhnazarov's comedy Poisons or the World History of Poisoning (2001). The actor performed both as pensioner Prokhorov and the Pope Alexander VI Borgia in it.

Among the actor's other works of the early 21st century one can mention the role of Prof. Fyodorov in the historical film The Romanovs: An Imperial Family (2000) and General Yepanchin in the TV series The Idiot (2003) directed by Vladimir Bortko after the famous novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

During the 1990s he was a visible political figure in Russia, and was elected the representative of Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) in 1990. Eventually he became a member of the pro-democratic group of representatives in the Russian Parliament, and a supporter of such politicians as Anatoly Sobchak and the first President of Russia Boris Yeltsin. He was a strong proponent of returning the original name to the city of Saint Petersburg. He quit politics after 2000, and focused on his acting career.[10]

He condemned the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and signed a public letter condemning the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine in support of Ukraine.[11][12]