Nikolai Sergeevich Plotnikov

Born Oct. 24 (Nov. 5), 1897, in Viaz’ma. Soviet Russian actor. People’s Artist of the USSR (1966). Member of the CPSU since 1954.

Plotnikov began acting in 1920 in the company of the People’s Theater in Viaz’ma. From 1922 to 1934 he acted in the Fourth Studio of the Moscow Art Theater (later the Realistic Theater); from 1922 to 1926 he also studied in the school of the Moscow Art Theater. He performed at the Theater of the Revolution from 1934 to 1936 and at the Central Red Army Theater from 1936 to 1938, when he became an actor at the Vakhtangov Theater.

Plotnikov is a versatile actor who has successfully played both character and comedy roles. He has also played gentle and poetic characters who are psychologically complex. In addition, he played V. I. Lenin in Pogodin’s Man With a Gun. His stage roles have included Shmaga in Ostrovskii’s Guilty Though Guiltless; Truffaldino in Goldoni’s A Servant of Two Masters; Maiakin in Foma Gordeev, adapted from Gorky’s novel; Serdiuk in Arbuzov’s Irkutsk Story; and Krutitskii in Ostrovskii’s Even a Wise Man Stumbles.

Plotnikov has appeared in films, playing Edgar in The Oppen-heim Family (1939) and the Kulak in Lenin in 1918 (1939), as well as Sintsov in Nine Days of One Year (1962). For the role of Nitochkin in Your Contemporary (1968) he received a prize in 1968 at the International Film Festival in Karlovy Vary. In 1972 the television film Nikolai Sergeevich Plotnikov was produced. From 1935 to 1937, Plotnikov taught in the acting school of MosfiPm, from 1937 to 1939 at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, and from 1932 to 1951 at the State Institute of Theatrical Arts, where he became a docent in 1946.

Plotnikov has been awarded the State Prize of the USSR (1947) and the K. S. Stanislavskii State Prize of the RSFSR (1970). He has also received the Order of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, and several medals.