Nikolai Karachentsov

Nikolai Petrovich Karachentsov (, 27 October 1944 – 26 October 2018) was a Soviet and Russian film and stage actor of Lenkom Theatre. Karachentsov's popularity peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s among the Soviet youth after he had starred in rock operas. In 1989 he was awarded the title of People's Artist of the RSFSR. In 2003 he received the State Prize of the Russian Federation. He was also awarded the Order of Honour and Order "For Merit to the Fatherland", 4th class. Nikolai's mother, Yanina Brunak (1913–1992),

Karachentsov's parents separated, so when Yanina Evgenyevna would leave Moscow for work, Kolya studied and lived in a boarding school. In school days, he spent all summer vacations in the recreation center of the All-Russian Theater Society in the village of Shylykovo, Kostroma Oblast. In his childhood, Karachentsov was actively engaged in swimming and by the age of 13 he became the champion of the USSR's central sport school in diving. He left his swimming lessons when, together with his mother, he moved to Ulaanbaatar for two years. His role in the student performances Snowstorm and Ivan Vasilyevich received a high professional assessment. Usually school graduates were automatically "distributed" to the Moscow Art Theater, but in 1967 at the Lenkom Theatre, in connection with the departure from the post of the main director Anatoly Efros, there was a catastrophic situation of shortage of actors, and Karachentsov among the top ten students joined this theater.

Among Karachentsov's first performances were the plays staged by Efros: 104 Pages About Love, My Poor Marat, The Movie is Being Shot, Fear and Despair in the Third Empire and Farewell to Arms!.

After Karachentsov's successful first experience in the play Autograd 21 (1973), Lenkom's director Mark Zakharov invited him for the main role of Till Eulenspiegel in his next play Till (1974). The play, based on the novel by Charles De Coster, was written by playwright Grigori Gorin, and the composer Gennady Gladkov composed the music for the production. Through Karachentsov's performance, the character of Till – a buffoon, bully and rebel – became a cult figure of the 1970s Soviet youth.

The most famous theatrical work of Karachentsov is the role of Count Rezanov in the rock opera Juno and Avos, a play that became a calling card of Lenkom. In 1983, the show was recorded for television and the same year the famous French couturier Pierre Cardin introduced the Juno and Avos to the French audience at the Espace Cardin Theater in Paris, followed by a triumphant tour around the world: the performance was shown in the US, Germany, Netherlands and other countries.

Personal life In 1975 Karachentsov married Russian actress Lyudmila Porgina who gave birth to their son Andrey three years later.

One of Karachentsov's main hobbies was tennis. He became a recurrent participant in several tennis tournaments, including "Big Hats", "Marco-Garros", for the cup of the "Big Cap". In 1994, paired with TV presenter Boris Notkin, he was allowed to play with the first president of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin. Among the regular partners of Karachentsov were tennis player and coach Shamil Tarpishchev, vice-president of the Tennis Federation of the North-West region Igor Dzhelepov, composer Maksim Dunayevsky and poet Yury Ryashentsev.

Karachentsov was a member of the United Russia party.

Injury, illness and death On 28 February 2005, Karachentsov was driving his car, a Volkswagen Passat, to Moscow, on his way to his mother-in-law's funeral when he lost control of his vehicle and crashed into a street light pole, suffering a traumatic brain injury. His seat belt was not fastened. After twenty-six days in coma, he began regaining motor skills, finally being able to get up onto a stage in 2007. Despite some improvement, he never fully recovered after the accident, his speech and ability to walk remained severely impaired. His only cinema appearance after the crash was a minor role almost without words in the film White Dew: The Return in 2014.

In 2017 Karachentsov was diagnosed with lung cancer and underwent unsuccessful treatment in Israel.

On 26 October 2018 Karachentsov died from kidney failure in a Moscow clinic, The Cat Who Walked by Herself (Кошка, которая гуляла сама по себе, 1988) as Hourse