Actors - Vladimir Vysotsky

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	Actors - Vladimir Vysotsky

Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky (Влади́мир Семёнович Высо́цкий) (January 25 1938 – July 25 1980) was a Russian singer, song-writer, poet, and actor, whose career has had an immense and enduring effect on Russian culture. The multifaceted talent of Vladimir Vysotsky is often described by the word bard that acquired a special meaning in the Soviet Union, although he himself spoke of this term with irony. He thought of himself mainly as an actor and writer, and once remarked, "I do not belong to what people call bards or minstrels or whatever." Though his work was was largely ignored and suppressed by the official Soviet cultural establishment, he achieved remarkable fame during his lifetime and to this exerts significant influence on many of Russia's popular musicians and actors who wish to emulate his iconic status.

Biography

Vladimir Vysotsky was born in Moscow. His father was an army officer and his mother a German language translator. His parents divorced shortly after his birth, and he was brought up by his stepmother of Armenian descent, "aunt" Yevgenia. He spent two years of his childhood living with his father and stepmother at a military base in Eberswalde in Soviet-occupied section of post-WWII Germany (later GDR).

In 1955, Vladimir enrolled in Moscow Institute of Civil Engineering but dropped out after just one semester to pursue an acting career. In 1959 he started acting at the Aleksandr Pushkin Theatre where he had mostly small parts.

Vysotsky's first wife was Iza Zhukova. He met his second wife, Ludmilla Abramova, in 1961. They got married in 1965 and had two sons, Arkady and Nikita.

In 1964, on invitation of director Yuri Lyubimov, who was to become his paternal friend, he joined the popular Moscow Theatre of Drama and Comedy on the Taganka. He made headlines with his leading roles in Shakespeare's Hamlet and Brecht's The Life of Galileo. — Around the same time he also appeared in several movies, which featured a few of his songs. See Vertikal (The Vertical), a movie about the extremes of mountain-climbing. Most of Vysotsky's work from the period, however, did not get official recognition and thus no breaks from the Soviet monopoly recording studio Melodiya. Nevertheless, his popularity continued to grow, as, with the advent of portable tape-recorders in the USSR, his music became available to the wide masses in the form of home-made cassette tapes. He became known for his unique singing style and for his lyrics, which incorporated social and political commentary into often humorous street vocabulary. His lyrics resonated with millions of Soviet people in every corner of the country; his songs sung at house-parite and amateur concerts.

Living in divorce, Vysotsky fell in love with a French actress Marina Vlady (of Russian descent), who was working at Mosfilm on a joint Soviet-French production at that time. Marina had been married before and had 3 children, while Vladimir had two. Fueled by Marina's exotic status of a Frenchwoman in USSR, and Vladimir's unmatched popularity in his country, their love was passionate and impulsive. They were married in 1969. For the 10 years the two maintained a partially long-distance relationship, while Marina made compromises with her career in France in order to spend more time in Moscow, and Vladimir's friends pulled strings in order for him to be allowed to travel abroad to stay with his wife. Marina eventually joined the Communist Party of France, which essentially gave her an unlimited-entry visa into the USSR, and provided Vladimir with some immunity to prosecution by the government, which was becoming weary of his covertly anti-Soviet lyrics and his odds-defying popularity with the masses. The problems of his long-distance relationship with Vlady inspired several of Vysotsky's songs, including "07" and "She Was In Paris."

By the mid 1970s Vysotsky had been suffering from alcoholism for quite some time and was also struggling with morphine (and other opiate) addiction. Many of his songs from the period deal--either directly or metaphorically--with alcoholism, insanity, obsessive behavior and other deviations. This was also the height of his popularity, when, as described in Vlady's book about her husband, walking down the street on a summer night, one could hear Vystotsky's recognizable voice coming literally from every open window. Unable to completely ignore his musical phenomenon, Melodiya did release a few of his songs on disks in the late 1970s, which, however, constituted but a small portion of his creative work, which millions already owned on tape and knew by heart. Vysotsky gained official recognition as theater and film actor. He starred in a hugely popular TV show "Mesto Vstrechi Izmenit' Nel'zya" about two cops fighting crime in late 1940s Stalinist Russia. In spite of his successful acting career, Vysotsky continued to make a living with his concert tours across the country, often on a compulsive binge-like schedule, which, it is believed, contributed to the deterioration of his health. He died in Moscow at the age of 42 of heart failure, which was possibly triggered by a drinking binge or a drug overdose.

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