19 Dec 1933
Born in Moscow Galina Volchek — actress, theatre director and teacher.
The theatre is a meat grinder that has ground up my whole life.
Her parents worked at Mosfilm: her father was a director, and her mother a screenwriter. She fell in love with the theater as a child.
Cinema was part of my everyday life and never held any mystery. But theater remained mysterious, interesting, and alluring.
I finished school at 15 because I thought the stage would die without me, and I would die without it.
In 1955, she graduated from the Moscow Art Theatre School. A year later, along with other graduates, Efremov, Evstigneev, Tabakov и Kvasha — organized a studio of young actors, which soon became famous as the Sovremennik Theatre.
While the troupe didn't have a space, she let her apartment be used for rehearsals. In her debut performance, "Forever Alive," she played Nyurka the Bread Slicer, combining the role with her duties as the studio cashier.
I did everything I could to get Nyurka going. I even secretly drank a quarter of a pint behind the screen before going out, to feel cheeky and aggressive.
She began directing at 28, and has since staged over 30 plays. Her first production, "Two for the Seesaw" (1962), was a great success.
At 32, she received the USSR State Prize for the play “An Ordinary Story” based on Goncharov’s novel.
She was interested in fashion and sewed elegant and feminine outfits for herself.
The word "director" doesn't have a feminine gender, which is perfectly natural. This occupation requires superhuman patience, which women rarely possess.
She played episodic roles in the films: “Beware of the Car”, “Don Quixote”, “King Lear”, “Autumn Marathon”, and was the “she-wolf” in “Little Red Riding Hood”.
I get irritated when people praise my on-screen roles, which I don't think deserve praise. If a policeman stops me for breaking the rules and comes up to me with a smile: "Oh, I recognized you! I saw you in such-and-such a film," I think, "It would be better if he fined me than remind me of this disgrace."
Since 1972, she has focused on theatre work and was the artistic director of Sovremennik for almost 50 years.
In difficult times, she kept up a good front: when in 1974 censors demanded that songs be removed from the play "Your Island" Vysotsky, defended the poet.
The most valuable thing about our theater is that we never lied. Even when we couldn't tell the whole truth.
She was the first Soviet theater director to stage a play in the United States: in 1978, at the height of the Cold War, Houstonians saw her production of "Echelon," based on Roshchin's novel about the evacuation of women and children in the fall of 1941. The project was a Russian-American collaboration.
With their actresses, who hadn't even heard about the war, or heard about it indirectly, I managed to stage "Echelon" in such a way that they looked like Russian women.
In 1996, the Sovremennik company took to the Broadway stage. The success was so resounding that for the first time in the history of the prestigious American Drama Desk Award, it was awarded to a foreign theater.
She staged performances in Europe and taught in Russia and abroad.
In 1999, she directed one of the Russian theatrical masterpieces, Three Comrades, based on Remark.
In 1995, she was elected as a State Duma deputy from the association “Our Home is Russia”.
In 2000, along with other cultural figures, she condemned the return to the Soviet anthem with Alexandrov's music.
In 2018, she became a trusted person in the elections of Putin and Sobyanin.
She died in Moscow in 2019 from cerebral and pulmonary edema. She was 86.
I live so that the theatre will live on, including after my time. Otherwise, why work?
I don't know how to be second. And I don't even know how to be first. Only the only one.