Ludmilla Gurchenko made a huge splash early in her career but immediately suffered an official backlash, and, though it did not dent her popularity, her career was severely curtailed.
Ludmilla Markovna Gurchenko was born in 1935 in Ukraine. Her parents worked for the Kharkov Philharmonic Orchestra, and she spent her childhood in the city, which the Nazis and the Red Army recaptured from each other several times between 1941 and 1943. In 1944 she entered music school, and moved to Moscow in 1953 to study acting with the husband and wife Sergei Gerasimov and Tamara Makarova, at the state film school VGIK. She graduated in 1958. Her light soprano made her ideal for ingénue roles and while there, she played straight and musical roles including Keto in Viktor Dolidze’s comic opera Kote and Keto.
Gurchenko’s first film role was in The Road of Truth (Doroga pravdy, 1956), written by Gerasimov and starring his wife. But her career was launched with Eldar Ryazanov’s Carnival Night (Karnivalnaya noch, 1958), a musical that used the freedoms of Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw to poke gentle fun at stuffy minor officialdom. The new director of the economics institute wants to ensure that a new year stage show is “on-message”, but the young Komsomols, chafing at the restrictions, frustrate him at every opportunity. Such minor questioning of the regime was allowed as long as the underpinning philosophy remained untouched. It caught the mood of the time and became hugely popular, with its catchy tunes, not least Five Minutes which Gurchenko sings in the run-up to midnight.
Gurchenko was able to spin off a career as a singer, including various songs from the film, and toured extensively. It may have been ambiguities of the Thaw or perhaps professional rivalries, but there was something of a press campaign and she was denounced as too “Western” and was alleged to have accepted cash payments in addition to her state salary. She also claimed to have been punished for refusing to act as an informer for the KGB. She had already shot her next film The Girl with a Guitar (Devushka s gitaroi) but it was given limited distribution, further harming her cinema prospects. For over a decade, her film career was hobbled and she did not have the success that she deserved or might have expected. Mostly she got middle billing in middling films. However, she turned in some good performances, as in Balzaminov’s Wedding (Zhenitba Balzaminova, 1965), an amusing adaptation of Alexander Ostrovsky’s wry comedy about the difficulty of those who wish to marry above their station.
In the mid-1960s she spent time with various theatre companies, in roles as wide ranging as Roxanne in Cyrano de Bergerac, the Marquis de la Mole’s daughter Mathilde in Gerasimov’s staging of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and Bianca in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate. Meanwhile, she continued singing, though it was a dispiriting round of mines and factories, where she wore a forced smile for the comrades.
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The cinema of Leonid Brezhnev’s stagnation struggled with how reality had fallen short of the Revolution’s promises, and examined the impact on women. Gurchenko appeared in films such as Sentimental Novel (Sentimentalnii roman, 1977), based on the autobiography of Vera Panova who had suffered under the regime, and the heartbreak-comedy The Mechanic Gavrilov’s Beloved (Liubimaya zhenshchina mekhanika Gavrilova, 1982).
But the beginning of Gurchenko’s new life came in 1979, when she played the lead in Andrei Konchalovsky’s epic Siberiade, which follows two families in Siberia from 1904 to the late 1960s, opposite the director’s brother Nikita Mikhalkov. During a 25-day break she and Mikhalkov filmed Alexander Volodin’s Thaw play Five Evenings (Pyat vecher), which tries, not entirely successfully, to imply that the disappointments of that time were over. She also had a cameo in Getting to Know the Big Wide World (Poznavaya belyy svet), a slyly artificial twist on a socialist realist story, directed by her VGIK classmate Kira Muratova.
Ironically, another splash would come with Aleksei German’s Twenty Days Without War (Dvatsat dney bez voiny), which was released in 1981 but had been held up for five years, having been denounced as “the shame of Lenfilm”. The documentary-style story of a soldier-author advising on a propaganda film is based on Konstantin Simonov (who narrates part of it), but it was seen as too downbeat. Gurchenko plays his former wife, one of those who believe the official myth.
The bittersweet rom-com Station for Two (Vokzal dlya dvoikh, 1982), directed by Ryazanov, brought another huge hit. Top-billed Gurchenko played a dowdy waitress in a railway café who argues with a stranded passenger over the inedible food but ends up waiting for his return from prison.
Her singing career continued and her unconcern seemed to reinforce her popularity as she developed a talent for outrageous statements and had a series of increasingly bizarre face-lifts (ironically Gurchenko appeared in an adaptation of Karel Capek’s The Makropoulos Case, about a 300-year-old opera singer). She became a gay icon and sang duets with Russia’s only “out” pop star Boris Moiseyev, her light soprano now huskier.
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She was married five times. She had a daughter with the historian Boris Andronikashvili. Her second husband was the actor Alexander Fadeyev. After a brief third marriage, to Iosif Kobzon (the Russian Frank Sinatra), she had a long but stormy marriage to Konstantin Kuperveis, who became her regular accompanist. Gurchenko fell in February and died from complications after surgery. She is survived by her last husband, the film producer Sergei Senin, and her daughter.
Ludmilla Gurchenko, actress and singer, was born on November 12, 1935. She died on March 30, 2011, aged 75