Alla Demidova

Alla Sergeyevna Demidova (; born 29 September 1936) 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 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. 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. 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 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. 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 part was very close to my heart and artistically intriguing too. I had to play not just an ordinary woman, but a poet, which involved exploring the process of giving birth to poetry, as well as discovering this fine line between my heroine's every day tribulations and the film's sublime philosophical essence," she explained, speaking to the Yunost magazine in 1968. This success did little to dispel Demidova's intrinsic mistrust in the cinema as an art form. "What a pity such a full-bloodied role had been given to me in film, not in theater," she complained in the same interview. In 1969 she appeared in Igor Talankin's Tchaikovsky as Yulia von Mekk.

In 1968 Demidova started to get major roles in Taganka, Elmyra in Molière's Tartuffe being the first in the line. Much lauded was Demidova's Pani Bozhentska in the adaptation of Jerzy Stawinski's The Rush Hour, the role she soon came to detest, though. "In the play which was both phantasmagoric and strikingly real, Demidova artfully portrayed a woman, misguided rather than vile," wrote Raisa Benyash. Critics admired the actresses' willingness to approach the new dimensions in classics, bringing new light and shade to the well known characters of Russian theater's past. Still, Demidova felt underrated and ignored at Taganka and defined herself as an Efros's kind of actress. This was later corroborated by her colleagues. "She definitely wasn't what one may call a director's favourite, her life in Taganka was difficult. She managed to retain her individuality and refine her distinctive style only by using all of her inner strength, intelligence and talent," wrote fellow actor and author Veniamin Smekhov.

After the success of Hamlet, Demidova started to receive numerous offers, but felt disappointed with the way directors tried to exploit the most obvious aspects of her stage persona. Still, lauded were her performances as Arkadina in the 1972 movie Seagull (directed by Yuli Karasik, based on Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull), where the actress, making her character going through unexpected metamorphoses, totally outplayed her colleagues, as well as Lesia Ukrainka in I'm Going to You (Idu k tebe, 1971, directed by Nikolai Mashchenko). Her Anne Stanton (in All The King's Men, 1971) impressed Oleg Efremov, who reportedly remarked: "Of all our actresses, Demidova is the one who's got the liveliest eyes". and the Duchess of Marlborough in Yuli Karasik's The Glass of Water (1979), alongside Kirill Lavrov's Lord Bolingbroke.

As Yuri Lyubimov, invited to direct at Milan's La Scala, left Taganka, Anatoly Efros entered in. He decided to produce The Cherry Orchard, aiming from the start to come up with something quite different from the old-fashioned textbook Moscow Art Theater version of the Chekhov's classic. Demidova as a 'modernist' Ranevskaya, managed to aesthetically re-vamp this character, merging tragedy and eccentricity, sentimentality and irony. Critics were divided in their assessment of Efros' concept and the quality of the production in general, but even detractors had to agree that what saved the experiment from flopping were Demidova and Vladimir Vysotsky as Lopatin. "Initially the [Chekhov's] heroine for me was totally alien. As time went by, I was beginning to see myself as 'me-as-Ranevskaya' more and more," Demidova remarked years later. One of the Efros interpretation's harshest critics was Lyubimov who described Demidova's performance as "mannered" and "grotesque." Tellingly, several years later he asked Demidova to reproduce what he called "the Ranevskaya algorithm" in the final act of Chekhov's Three Sisters (1981) where her Masha, initially ironic and aloof, demonstrated the disturbing outburst of emotions in the play's final stages.

Demidova and Vysotsky In the late 1970s Demidova and Vysotsky, both irritated by Lyubimov's artistic dictatorship, gravitated into a tandem (where, as one critic put it, "ice and fire clashed") to experiment with ideas of their own. It was in her solo stage projects that Demidova managed finally to fulfil what's been left of her potential that Lyubimov and Efros, two renown Russian theater directors failed to notice and use, critic Tatyana Moskvina opined.

After Lyubimov's departure to the West, Demidova gradually withdrew from Taganka. In 1986 Efros revived the Cherry Orchard production, casting Demidova in the leading role. It won the 1st Prize at BITEF, then had a successful run in Paris, in the wake of its director's death.

1990s Demidova's performance as Electra in Sophocles' Electra which premiered in Athens, Greece, in 1992, happened to be her final one under Lyubimov. As the major conflict broke out in the theatre and Taganka split into two, Demidova supported Lyubimov. The A Theater's next work (again with Terzopoulos), Mueller's version of Medea, premiered on 29 April 1996; Russian critics saw it as an attempt to create the new style of contemporary tragedy by reviving the "arch-myth, buried in human subconscious." Working with Terzopoulos changed Demidova's perception of theater. "After Electra, Phaedra and Medea all things that went before them tasted insipid," she confessed. In 2001 Hamlet the Master Class, the A Theatre and the Greek Attis theatres' joint production, came out. Premiered at the Moscow Theatrical Olympiad, it featured Demidova as Hamlet (her early tutor Anna Orochko's idea finally realised), as well as Gertrude and Ophelia.

2000 – present In 2000–2002 Demidova appeared on screen twice, first as Lora Lyons (in Remembering Sherlock Holmes, a Russian TV serial) then as mad Elsa (in Letters to Elsa, a film based on Vladimir Vysotsky's son Arkady's screenplay). – Demidova declared she's lost all interest in being filmed.

Throughout the 2000s Alla Demidova was staging her poetry recitals regularly (performing in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Israel) and continued to do so in the early 2010s. As of 2014 she published nine books on theater, including Vladimir Vysotsky (1989), My Memory's News Ticker (2000) and Akhmatova's Mirrors (2004).