Innokenty Smoktunovsky

Innokenty Mikhaylovich Smoktunovsky was a Soviet actor acclaimed as the king of Soviet actors. He was named Peoples Artist of the USSR in 1974 and the Hero of Socialist Labour in 1990.

Smoktunovsky was born in a Siberian village in a peasant family of Belarusian ethnicity. It was once rumored that he came from a Polish family, even nobility, but the actor himself disapproved those theories by stating his family was Belarusian and not of nobility. He served in the Red Army during World War II. In 1946, he joined a theatre in Krasnoyarsk, later moving to Moscow. In 1957, he was invited by Georgy Tovstonogov to join the Bolshoi Drama Theatre of Leningrad, where he stunned the public with his dramatic interpretation of Prince Myshkin in Dostoyevskys The Idiot. One of his best roles was the title role in Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoys Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich .

Source: Wikipedia