"My God, people live so hard. Let them laugh": 95 years since the birth of Leonid Gaidai

Leonid Iovich Gaidai was born on January 30, 1923 in the city of Svobodny, Amur province, but soon the family moved to Irkutsk. His father was from a family of serfs, in 1908 he took on someone else's guilt for the crime — he pitied a father with many children — and was sentenced to hard labor on the Amur railway. I met my wife Maria by correspondence — one of the convicts decided to introduce Job to his sister and sent his photo. After his release, he got married, worked on the railroad and thought that his children would continue his work — there were two sons and a daughter in the family, but no one followed in his father's footsteps.

Source: domkino.tv

Leonid Gaidai graduated from the Irkutsk railway school, and two days after graduation, the war began. By the time the future director was drafted into the army, he had already been a stage handyman for a year in the Satire Theater evacuated from Moscow. First, Leonid Gaidai was sent to Mongolia to break wild horses for the front. Then he was sent to the Kalinin Front for reconnaissance, where he was seriously wounded after being blown up by a mine. In 1942, he received the medal "For Military Merit".

After the war, Leonid Gaidai graduated from the directing department of VGIK and started working. After the first independent film, he was suspended from the director's chair for two years for the satirical film "The Groom from the Other World", which ridiculed the bureaucracy. There were so many edits from censorship that after cutting out all the objectionable scenes, the film turned into a short film.

They were allowed to return to the profession only for the sake of the "right" film about Komsomol members "Thrice Resurrected". After him, the bosses of the Leonid Gaidai film studio forgave him, but the director later tried not to mention this film.

A shot from the movie "Thrice Resurrected".

At VGIK, Gaidai met Nina Grebeshkova, a student of the acting faculty. She became his wife—the first and only one. The couple lived together for forty years, and they had a daughter, Oksana. Neither daughter nor granddaughter followed in their footsteps — both went into the economy.

The first success came to Leonid Gaidai after the short comedies "Dog Barbos and unusual cross" and "Moonshiners". In 1961, "Dog Barbos" was filmed based on an unpretentious feuilleton in verse, which the director read in the newspaper Pravda. The fact that he was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival as the best short film came as a surprise to everyone. In this short film, the first appearance on the screen of the famous trinity took place — a Coward, a Dunce and a Seasoned One.

In a few years, three films that made Leonid Gaidai a famous, popular and beloved director of the Soviet audience will be released at once — "Operation Y" and other Adventures of Shurik", "The Caucasian Captive, or the New Adventures of Shurik" and "The Diamond Hand".

In the list of 20 leaders in the entire history of the Soviet rental, "Diamond Hand" and "Caucasian Captive" occupy the second and third places, "Operation Y" is only slightly behind — it has the seventh place.

In the seventeenth place was another film by Leonid Gaidai — "Ivan Vasilyevich changes his profession." This is an absolute record — no director has taken four positions in the rating at once.

Leonid Gaidai liked to work with the same actors. Most often, Georgy Vitsin and Viktor Uralsky starred with him — the actors appeared in ten of the director's films. In nine films, the director shot his wife Nina Grebeshkova. Sergey Filippov played roles in eight films, Leonid Gaidai's namesake Leonid Kuravlev and Yuri Nikulin starred seven times. Mikhail Pugovkin, Mikhail Kokshenov and Natalia Krachkovskaya appeared in six films. Actor Alexander Demyanenko starred in only three works by Gaidai, but his last name became associated with the films of this director.

The director wrote the famous Shurik from himself. He wanted to create a new positive character in Soviet cinema — a ridiculous, kind, bespectacled man who is completely unsuited to everyday life and who has everything falling out of his hands.

Leonid Gaidai had two signs. First: he always broke the plate before the start of filming, and if the plate did not break, the work was postponed. Second: the director believed that black cats bring him good luck. His black mascots appear in the films "Operation "S", "Diamond Hand" and "Ivan Vasilyevich changes his profession".

Leonid Gaidai sometimes starred in episodes of his films. In "Thrice Resurrected" he played the inventor, in "Diamond Hand" only his legs are visible — he was the drunkard whom Semyon Gorbunkov found in the gateway, in "Twelve Chairs" he played the archivist Bartholomew Korobeynikov. The last role was in his last film — "It's good weather on Deribasovskaya Street, or it's raining again on Brighton Beach", where he appeared in the image of a crazy casino player.

In 2012, a monument to Leonid Gaidai was erected in Irkutsk. He is part of a whole sculptural composition — there is a trio of Coward, Idiot and Seasoned, and Leonid Gaidai is sitting next to him on the director's chair, at whose feet the Dog Barbos is perched with a dynamite stick in his teeth. Another monument to the legendary comedian stands in the city of Svobodny — the homeland of the director.