2 February 1989 year
The actor and artist died of cardiac arrest in his one-room apartment. Yuri Bogatyrev. He was 41 years old.
An actor must constantly think: “Why am I playing this role? For what purpose?”
Lord, how happy I am! Voltaire, you and Mama—I need nothing more! And Glinka, too, by the way.
(Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano)
Ilya, first shed the fat and the weight of your body. Then the sleep of your soul will fly away.
(A Few Days in the Life of I.I. Oblomov)
If I am, as you put it, a goat, then my wife... she is, naturally, a goat?
("Relatives")
Born in 1947 Riga. The father, a naval officer, really wanted a boy and was happy when, after several years of waiting, it happened.
He grew up artistic - as a little boy he would dance the "Yablochko" dance in front of his father's colleagues, and stubborn - he would repeat the word "blusnika" for hours until he stopped lisping.
I was five when I moved in Moscow And at 10, my father sent me to the Nakhimov Naval School. Leningrad He went alone. A homebody and straight-A student, he didn't fit in with the new group, and his Moscow peers teased him for being a "girlie" (he hung out with girls and put on puppet shows with them in the courtyard). After his classmates stole his hat and socks, he returned home half-naked, alone, in the freezing cold. The idea of making Yura a sailor was abandoned.
My father and I used to say, “Yura, be whoever you want.”
(from my mother's memories)
For a long time, I couldn't figure out who I wanted to be more: an artist or a painter. I drew amazingly, adored the World of Art group, and admired the "Jack of Diamonds" group.
The graphics of this drawing actor, a refined aesthete, are vaguely reminiscent of the decadent times, Bakst and Somov, and even more so Wilde and Beardsley
(artist Sergei Barkhin)
At 16, he entered the Art College, studying carpet weaving. He didn't finish his studies; at 18, he joined the Globus Puppet Theater Studio, led by Vladimir Stein, and there I decided on career guidance.
At 19, he became a student at Shchukin Theatre School. He got into the course Yuri Katin-Yartsev — together with Konstantin Raikin, Natalia Gundareva и Natalya Varley.
We all tried to talk like him, joke like him—our entire class's tastes were tailored to Yura. At the same time, they made fun of him a little, teased him, called him "pelmeni"... or "pink-and-white": he was like a marshmallow—soft, plump, cozy.
(Natalya Varley)
On stage he was incredibly flexible – he knew how to transform into a wide variety of characters and find the most precise intonation.
Our actors are very attached to their roles. And this is instilled in them already at the school. There, they determine what the actress will play in the future—an ingenue, a drag queen, a heroine, or a character role. Although we, the teachers, talk a lot about the need for an actor to be versatile, the idea of a type, the mentality of a role, still looms large. What could Yura play? Everything!
(Alexander Shirvindt)
However, the gift of being different every time had a downside - he often complained to his friends: "No one recognizes me on the street."
He invited me to the cinema. Nikita Mikhalkov — in his first full-length film, "At Home Among Strangers...." For his role as a Chekist, he ate cabbage cutlets without bread for several months to lose weight. Within a few days, he mastered horseback riding. He demonstrated incredible endurance; his powerful arms were described as "upper legs."
I was shocked once when we were supposed to film scenes where he clenches his fist. I saw him clench his fist in a completely feminine way, pressing his thumb into his palm, and I was completely shocked. I asked, "Yura... Have you never been in a fight?" And he admitted that yes, he never had.
(Nikita Mikhalkov)
Punch a friend Kaidanovsky Bogatyrev was then helped by a memory: he had once accidentally pinched the finger of a good friend in a door: "I'll kill you, you bastard." It turned out convincing.
He played dozens of roles in films and on stage at Sovremennik and the Moscow Art Theatre.
In recent years, he suffered from depression, partly, as many believe, due to his identity being rejected by society at the time. He had problems with alcohol. During a party after receiving his paycheck for the film "Dark Eyes," he suffered a heart attack. According to one theory, a doctor administered a drug incompatible with alcohol and antidepressants. He died a month before his 42nd birthday.
