Oleg Yankovsky, the star of cult films by Andrei Tarkovsky and the last actor designated as a People’s Artist of the USSR, died in Moscow yesterday after battling cancer. He was 65.

Yankovsky, born to an aristocratic family exiled to Kazakhstan under dictator Josef Stalin in the 1930s, last performed on stage this year at Moscow’s Lenkom Theater, where he spent most of his more than four-decade long career. He returned to Russia in February after medical treatment in Germany to act in The Marriage, a comedy by Nikolai Gogol.

Leading Russian politicians, actors and directors paid tribute today to the actor, who played the father in Tarkovsky’s semi-autobiographical 1975 film The Mirror and the writer star of Nostalghia in 1983.

Tsar, the Pavel Lungin film in which Yankovsky plays his last film role as Metropolitan Filipp, the childhood friend and adviser to Ivan the Terrible, screened at the Cannes film festival in the Un Certain Regard section on May 17 and is scheduled to open in Russia this fall. The role earned Yankovsky praise for a “terrific” performance from Variety magazine reviewer Derek Elley, who called the film itself “laden with Russian brooding and violence.”

Actor Robert De Niro, a friend, last month visited Yankovsky while in Moscow for the opening of the Nobu restaurant. “I was happy to see him and his son and his grandson, and have him see my son,” De Niro told reporters at the time. “It was a good reunion.”

Audiences, however, are most likely to remember Yankovsky’s performance in last year’s hit musical comedy Stilyagi.

Source: Bloomberg