page_title: Innokenty Smoktunovsky
section_title: Film career
hierarchical_section_title: Innokenty Smoktunovsky / Film career
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Персонажи фильма «Гамлет», 1964, СССР. На марке представлены артисты Анастасия Вертинская и Иннокентий Смоктуновский. Серия почтовых марок «Сцены из советских фильмов» из 2-х. На каждой марке помещена сцена из фильма и его название. Дата выпуска: 1966. Страна: СССР (Россия) / USSR (Russia). Номинал: 10 к / 10 k Michel #3191
context_page_description: Innokenty Mikhaylovich Smoktunovsky was a Soviet actor acclaimed as the "king of Soviet actors". He was named a People's Artist of the USSR in 1974 and the Hero of Socialist Labour in 1990.
context_section_description: His career in film was launched by Mikhail Romm's movie Nine Days in One Year (1962). In 1964, he was cast in the role of Hamlet in Grigori Kozintsev's celebrated screen version of Shakespeare's play, which won him praise from Laurence Olivier as well as the Lenin Prize. Many English critics even ranked the Hamlet of Smoktunovsky above the one played by Olivier, at a time when Olivier's was still considered definitive. Smoktunovsky created an integral heroic portrait, which blended together what seemed incompatible before: manly simplicity and exquisite aristocratism, kindness and caustic sarcasm, a derisive mindset and self-sacrifice.
  Smoktunovsky became known to wider audiences as Yuri Detochkin in Eldar Ryazanov's detective satire Beware of the Car (1966), which revealed the actor's outstanding comic gifts. Later, he played Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in Tchaikovsky (1969), Uncle Vanya in Andrei Konchalovsky's screen version of Chekhov's play (1970), the Narrator in Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror (1975), an old man in Anatoly Efros's On Thursday and Never Again (1977), and Salieri in Mikhail Schweitzer's Little Tragedies (1979) based on Aleksander Pushkin's plays.
  In 1990, Smoktunovsky won the Nika Award in the category Best Actor. He died on Wednesday 3 August 1994, at a sanatorium, aged 69. The minor planet 4926 Smoktunovskij was named after him.
caption: Smoktunovsky as Hamlet with Anastasiya Vertinskaya on a 1966 Soviet stamp
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