Evgenii Alekseevich Lebedev

Born Jan. 2 (15), 1917, in Balakovo, now in Saratov Oblast. Soviet Russian actor; People’s Artist of the USSR (1968).

Lebedev graduated from the Central Theatrical School in Moscow in 1940 and joined the troupe of the Russian Children’s Theater in Tbilisi. He moved to Leningrad and began working at the V. I. Lenin Komsomol Theater in 1949 and at the Gorky Bolshoi Drama Theater in 1956. Lebedev’s acting combines an incisive and often exaggerated rendering of character with inner lyricism, emotional uplift, and careful development of individual speech patterns.

Some of Lebedev’s important roles have been Pavel Korchagin in How the Steel Was Tempered (based on the novel by Ostrovskii), the boatswain Kobza in The Death of a Squadron by Korneichuk, Rogozhin in The Idiot (based on the Dostoevsky novel), Ukhov in My Elder Sister by Volodin, Monakhov in The Barbarians by Gorky, and Toot in Toot, the Major, and Others by Erken’. His greatest parts have been the title role in Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui and Bessemenov in Gorky’s The Philistines (State Prize of the USSR, 1968).

Lebedev has also performed in motion pictures, playing Suprugov in The Mercy Train (1964), the Father in The Last Month of Autumn (1965), and the Colonel in No Ford Through the Flames (1967).