22 February 2012 year
The actress has passed away Lyudmila Kasatkina. "The Tiger Tamer", "The Tamed Shrew", Bagheera from "Mowgli".
Ah, cinema! The damned poison...
She was born in 1925 Novoye Selo near Smolensk. It was three o'clock when my peasant parents were dispossessed, their livestock confiscated. That same night, without waiting for possible exile, the Kasatkins left for Moscow. There, they worked in a factory and rented a basement room in the former estate of the princes Obolensky.
When Lyuda moved up to the fifth grade, she was noticed by a choreographer Igor Lentovsky He was scouting talent for the choreography class at the Central Music School at the Conservatory. At 14, she broke her leg, and she had to stop ballet. But that gave her time for a spoken word studio.
I was 16 when I went to visit my grandmother in the Smolensk region for the holidays, and the war began. Having learned that the Germans were approaching Vyazma, I went on foot to Mozhaisk — to get home to Moscow.
We marched in a huge crowd toward Mozhaisk along with the retreating army. 120 kilometers in just a few days! We hid from the bombing in the swamps. I'll always remember the grief-stricken woman whose two children were killed.
She graduated from high school in 1943. She was worried that her short stature (159 cm) would prevent her from getting into GITIS—and it turned out she was wrong.
After graduating, she joined the troupe of the Central Theater of the Soviet Army, where she served her entire career. She was a diligent actress: for example, before her role as a judge in the play "Kovaleva from the Provinces," she attended court hearings to better get into character.
In 1954, she played the lead role in the film "Tiger Tamer," becoming an instant star.
There were lines at the movie theaters. When I went outside, boys would shout at me, "Little squirt! Little squirt!"—in the words from this film.
The stunt double for the tiger scenes was a trainer. Margarita Nazarova (barmaid Marianna in the film "Striped Trip"). But at some point, Nazarova was injured, and the directors needed close-ups of the heroine with the animals.
The director suddenly declared that the film wouldn't be released unless my face was filmed next to the tiger's. To save the film, I had to enter the cage. <> When we finally handed the film over to Lenfilm, [the trainer Boris] Eder said, "I, Eder, am proposing to Lyudmila Kasatkina to become a tiger tamer. She's got real guts." I refused. He was angry even then: "Didn't you feel a power in the cage that's stronger than anything else in the world?" "Power? No—passion."
At first, I really didn't like myself on screen. After one of my first auditions, I burst into tears.
I saw a round face, a plump girl... I came home, sobbing, and said to my mother: "Mommy, what did you do? Why did you give birth to me with such a round face?" Mommy looked down, tears streaming down her face: "Well, what can I do, baby? I have to carry this baby to term."
She played her most significant film roles in the films of her husband, the director Sergei Kolosov. They met at GITIS, courted each other for four years, and married in 1950. She played the spy Anna Morozova in "Calling Fire on Ourselves" and the monarchist Maria Zakharchenko in "Operation Trust."
When I started looking (this is the most important thing for us), and what is her subjective truth - everyone says “negative” - I realized that she loved Russia in a way that few of us love it now
For her role in the film "Remember Your Name" (playing a mother separated from her son in Auschwitz and only finding him 20 years later), I lost 12 kilograms. I read memoirs of concentration camp prisoners. But for a long time, I still couldn't figure out how to act the scene where my son is taken away.
I found a guard at the concentration camp where we were filming, and he opened a barracks for me where mountains of children's shoes were piled up. And all night… I stared at the children's shoes: worn-out, blood-caked, brand-new. I tried to guess who the shoes belonged to—a boy, a girl, how old they were, and how long they'd been in the concentration camp before their death… The next morning, when I heard over the megaphone, "To the barracks, for filming," I said, "I can film today."
She voiced cartoons - her voice is for Stepdaughter in "12 Months" and Bagheera in "Mowgli".
She passed away 11 days after her husband's death. She was 86.
