3 Dec 1995
The 49-year-old died Alexander Kaidanovsky — actor, screenwriter, director. Stalker from Tarkovsky's film.
The direct route isn't the shortest. The further you go, the less risk there is.
Was born in Rostov-on-Don in 1946. His father, an engineer, went through the war and served in the KGB. His mother, a cultural worker.
From the age of 11, after his parents' divorce, he lived with his father, his grandmother, or at a boarding school. After school, while studying to be a welder, he began writing stories.
He graduated from the Rostov Theatre School at 19 and from the Moscow Shchukin Theatre School at 24. His first role, at the Vakhtangov Theatre, was a small one: his character uttered the phrase "dinner is served."
I almost cried because it didn't correspond to my purpose. I immediately hated the theater.
After working for several years at the Moscow Art Theatre and the Theatre on Malaya Bronnaya, he went into film. Mikhalkov in "At home among strangers, a stranger among his own" and Solovyov in "Rescuer".
At 33 he played the leading role in the film Andrei Tarkovsky "Stalker" (1979). According to one version, the director set him the minimum acting goal—to remain himself on camera. Filming lasted three years. The film was a box office sensation: it became considered good form to see "Stalker" several times.
After this, Kaidanovsky's life turned upside down: having fallen in love with the director's profession, he enrolled in Tarkovsky's courses (and when Tarkovsky emigrated to Italy, he completed his studies with Sergei Solovyov).
He was never able to play for his teacher again: due to a juvenile conviction for a drunken brawl and a divorce, he was banned from traveling abroad.
At 36, he plunged headlong into directing.
I can't act with a director who is dumber than me.
He managed to make six films. The first four of them were Tarkovsky's unrealized ideas: "Jonah, or The Artist at Work" (a biography of Albert Camus), "A Simple Death" (a novella by Tolstoy), and "The Guest" and "The Garden" (novellas by Borges).
For the fifth film, The Kerosene Salesman's Wife (1988), he wrote the script himself.
The sixth film was a documentary biography of Sergei Parajanov (1989).
I would like my film to have no relation to our reality, so that it would somehow become detached from reality.
In the 90s, he had the opportunity to travel abroad, where he also filmed.
Taught in Russia.
I can't be anyone after Stalker. It's like playing Christ and then taking on the role of an accountant.
Kaidanovsky was an incredible person - he could swear masterfully, chat in gangster jargon, and could talk to you all night about literature, about things that not a single specialist here knew
(Leonid Filatov)
He never finished his last film, "Ascent to Eckhart," about a woman's journey to discover the meaning of life. While he was raising money for the film, he suffered three heart attacks.
He lived modestly in a Moscow communal apartment. He was married four times, the last time three weeks before his death.
Without hope for a miracle, life loses its reality, suffocates, withers, and becomes overgrown with appeals, posters, and monuments. In its place emerges a hideous sham.
