Alla Sergeyevna Demidova (; born 29 September 1936, Moscow) is a Russian actress internationally acclaimed for the tragic parts in innovative plays staged by Yuri Lyubimov in the Taganka Theatre. She was awarded the USSR State Prize (1977) and the Order of Merit for the Fatherland (twice, 2007, 2001).
Biography
Alla Demidova was born on 29 September 1936 in Zamoskvorechye, Moscow, and spent her early years at the Osipenko (now Sadovnicheskaya) Street. Her father Sergey Alekseyevich Demidov, an heir to the Russian industrialists' family, was jailed in 1932 in the course of the Great Purge, but soon got acquitted. In 1941 he joined the Red Army as a volunteer and was killed in action 1944, near Warsaw. Alla's mother, Aleksandra Dmitriyevna Demidova (née Kharchenko) was working at the Economy department of the Moscow University (later at its Cybernetics and economic programming section). Mother and daughter spent the World War II years in Vladimir, to the East of Moscow. "I received too little love from the people around me in those early years to remember them fondly," Demidova later confessed. She debuted as an actress on her school's amateur stage, enjoying her first taste of success.
Career
While still at school, Demidova joined the well-known Moscow actress Tatyana Shchekin-Krotova's courses to study drama. After the graduation she took the examinations at the Boris Shchukin Theatre Institute but failed due to flawed diction and enrolled in the Moscow University's Economy faculty. In 1959, after the graduation, she started teaching political economy at the University's Philosophy faculty. Before that, as a third year student, she joined the university Students' Theater, led by first Igor Lipsky, then Rolan Bykov. It was under the latter's guidance that in 1958 Demidova made her stage debut as Lida Petrusova in Such Kind of Love (Takaya lyubov), an adaptation of Pavel Kohout's play. Having joined the Shchukin School on the second attempt, Demidova started studying at the class of actress Anna Orochko, who experimented with her young protégé, and even suggested once that she should play Hamlet, something the actress would return to some forty years later. While still studying at the Shchukun Institute, Demidova performed in Vakhtangov Theatre's production of Death of Gods (Gibel bogov), in Princess Turandot and in The Cookie ("Stryapukha"). It was then that she was noticed by the French theatre specialist Jean Vilar who, after seeing the girl fencing in a gym, invited her to join the Theatre National Populaire, an offer that she had to decline. On the Shchukin stage she performed the leading role in Aleksander Afinogenov's Distant Things (Dalyokoye), played Mrs. Moon in The Scandalous Affair of Mr. Kettle and Mrs. Moon (after J. B. Priestley's play of the same name) and Madame Frisette in Frisette by Eugene Marin Labiche. In 1957 Demidova debuted on screen in the director Zakhar Agranenko's Leningrad Symphony. That was followed by Nine Years of One Year (director Mikhail Romm, 1961), What's a Relativity Theory? (Semyon Raitburg, 1963) and Komask (1965), the films she would later refer to as "my reconnaissance raid."
In 1964 Demidova graduated from the Shchukin Institute, having presented as her diploma work the role of Mrs. Young in Yuri Lyubimov's adaptation of Bertholt Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan. "Her role was peripheral but that didn't matter. The effect of her physical presence was enormous," the actor Boris Khmelnitsky later remembered. The young actress unsuccessfully tried to return to the Vaktangov's, spent several months at the Mayakovsky Theatre again without any role to cling to, and in the end of 1964 joined Taganka (which opened officially in April that year) to be employed there regularly, but mostly in unsubstantial roles. The reason for Lyubimov's mistrust might have been the fact that in her first leading role here, that of Vera in A Hero of Our Time, Demidova, admittedly, 'failed miserably'. Several years of hard work in mass scenes and pantomimes followed. This master-and-servant type of relationship between the theater director and his actress continued for decades.