What was hidden behind the wise irony and ironic wisdom of an outstanding artist
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In 1973, the whole country tightly stuck to the TVs and watched the serial film “Seventeen Moments of Spring”. This in itself is not a miracle: we have always loved films regarding intelligence officers. Leonid Armor.
By that time, Leonid Sergeevich did not have, unlike Vyacheslav Tikhonov, all-Union fame, and he was not handsome at all (he said to himself: “the face is not positive”), but his talent and charisma made a real miracle. Few people knew then that the fear of being exposed, arrests, interrogations for Leonid Bronevoy are not signs of a script, but the pages of his own biography that he has suffered.
Why is he Armored
Leonid was the son of Solomon Faktorovich and Bella Landau. The boy was born on December 17, 1928 in Kyiv, when his parents were studying at the university at the workers’ faculty. Bella really wanted her husband to follow the path of a lawyer, but Solomon, with the assistance of his brother, ended up in the economic department of the GPU. It was not long before Leni was born.
Bella Lvovna then, as Bronevoy later said, cried out all her tears. She seemed to have a presentiment of what a tragedy this “employment” would turn out to be for the whole family. But the Faktorovich brothers at that time did not care. In Civil, during the riots in Odessa, one of them, Abram, went with his chest to the White Guard armored car. The hero died, but his brothers with admiration began to be called “armored” or “armored”. Later, the nickname turned into a surname.
And the career of the Armored at first was a match for the nickname. Alexander took a prominent position in the Ukrainian GPU, helped Solomon with the work.
No trial or investigation
The first years of Leni Bronevoy were very prosperous, the family had a wonderful apartment in the city center. The boy grew up talented, learned to play the violin from the famous musician David Berthier. Childhood ended when the boy was eight years old. Father was arrested, they remembered that once at some meeting in the 1920s, Solomon spoke out in support of Trotsky.
By the way: In San Diego, during a tour with an actor, an incident occurred that shook him for the rest of his life. At a meeting with the audience, he was approached by a man who had once been interrogated by Solomon Faktorovich. The actor’s father, as an investigator for economic affairs, “knocked out” money from NEPmen. On that trip, Bronevoi also learned that his own aunt emigrated to the United States following the revolution and became a millionaire there.
The entire brilliant career of the Armored brothers ended in an instant. The actor’s uncle was destroyed without trial or investigation in his own office. The father was sentenced to ten years. Bella Lvovna was forced to divorce her husband. It was then that the son became, according to the documents, Leonid Sergeevich Bronev.
Son of an enemy of the people
But at first, this did not save the disgraced family. They were sent to the Kirov region and only on the eve of the war they were allowed to return to Kyiv once more. However, later evacuation to Chimkent followed, and for many years the life of Leonid Bronevoy was associated with Central Asia.
By the way: Experienced by Armor in childhood left a deep imprint on his soul. He categorically refused to join the party, even when he was hinted that without this he would not become a People’s Artist of the USSR. I did not understand those who tried to defend the Stalinist regime. And he was indignant at the attitude towards people from the Central Asian republics. He always remembered the good that he saw in the evacuation.
In Chimkent, Leonid graduated from high school and began to earn extra money in all possible ways. He was a baker’s apprentice, a “typist” secretary. But he was drawn to art. His creative career began with the fact that he worked in the sewing shop of the puppet theater. And only in 1950, at the age of 22, Armor entered the Tashkent Theater and Art Institute.
With the stigma “son of an enemy of the people” it was difficult to count on a bright future. And even following the exposure of the cult of personality, fate shook the actor around the province for a long time, despite the fact that he graduated from the Moscow Art Theater School as an external student. They assigned him to Grozny. He went there together with his wife Valentina Blinova, who graduated from the Shchukin School. In honor of his wife, the young couple named their daughter. An artistic family from Grozny moved to Irkutsk, and then settled in Voronezh.
Life has repaid
When the daughter was only four years old, his wife died of cancer. Out of desperation, Bronevoy went to Moscow, where his wife had relatives. He himself had not lived with his mother for a long time, and with his father, who managed to return alive following prisons and settlements and even get his awards back, he rarely spoke at all.
At first, Leonid was not taken anywhere in Moscow. It is hard to imagine that Armor earned himself and his daughter a living by playing dominoes. But in the end, luck smiled: he was taken to the Theater on Malaya Bronnaya. At first it was difficult to call it work for the soul. But then in 1967 Anatoly Efros came to the theater. And life seemed to begin to repay Leonid Sergeevich for all the suffering he endured. Theatrical Moscow began to learn regarding him.
And then “Seventeen Moments of Spring” broke out, where, quite unexpectedly, the audience saw the unusual Gestapo Muller. Who knows who Leonid Sergeevich was thinking regarding, endowing this beast with unexpected lyrical colors …
By the way: On the first day of filming “Seventeen Moments …” the actor signed with his second wife – Victoria. They say that the chairman of the KGB Andropov personally approved the role of Muller Bronevoy. And, pronouncing the name of the actor, Yuri Vladimirovich suddenly remembered that for some time in his youth he lived in Kyiv in the apartment of “some Armored”, who fed and watered a poor student. It turned out that it was Leonid Sergeevich’s uncle.
In 1988, Leonid Sergeevich moved to Lenkom, which gave the actor a second theatrical wind. His last role was Prince Sobakin, whom he played in 2016.
The roles of Armored in the cinema have long been dispersed into quotes. And even in the most ridiculous of them, the pain and wisdom of the outstanding Russian actor Leonid Sergeevich Bronevoy remained.
Photo sources: still from the film, Mikhail Strokov/ITAR-TASS, Legion-media