Grigori Aleksandrov

Grigori Vasilyevich Aleksandrov or Alexandrov (Григо́рий Васи́льевич Алекса́ндров; original family name was Мормоненко or Mormonenko; 23 January 1903 – 16 December 1983) was a prominent Soviet film director who was named a People's Artist of the USSR in 1947 and a Hero of Socialist Labour in 1973.

Aleksandrov was born Grigori Vasilyevich Mormonenko in Yekaterinburg, Russia in 1903.

Starting at age nine, Aleksandrov worked odd jobs at the Ekaterinburg Opera Theater, eventually making his way to assistant director.

He also pursued a musical education, studying violin at the Ekaterinburg Musical School, from which he graduated in 1917.

Aleksandrov came to Moscow after studying directing and briefly managing a movie theater.

In 1921, while acting with the Proletcult Theatre he met a then 23-year-old Sergei Eisenstein.

In 1923, Aleksandrov was given the main role in Eisenstein's adaptation of Alexander Ostrovsky’s 1868 comedy Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man (Na vsyakovo mudretsa dovolno prostoty) and in Eisenstein's first film Glumov's Diary (Дневник Глумова), a short film that was included in the play.

Eisenstein and Aleksandrov collaborated on several plays before Eisenstein made his first feature-length film, Strike, which Aleksandrov co-wrote with Eisenstein, Ilya Kravchunovsky, and Valeryan Pletnyov.

Next came Eisenstein's landmark Battleship Potemkin, in which Aleksandrov played Ippolit Giliarovsky.

Aleksandrov co-directed Eisenstein's next two features, October: Ten Days That Shook the World and The General Line, which were also their last works in the silent era.

Initially associated with Sergei Eisenstein, with whom he worked as a co-director, screenwriter and actor, Aleksandrov became a major director in his own right in the 1930s, when he directed Jolly Fellows and a string of other musical comedies starring his wife Lyubov Orlova.

Though Aleksandrov remained active until his death, his musicals, amongst the first made in the Soviet Union, remain his most popular films.

They rival Ivan Pyryev's films as the most effective and light-hearted showcase ever designed for the Stalin-era USSR.

Along with Eisenstein's other major collaborator, cinematographer Eduard Tisse, Aleksandrov joined the director when he came to Hollywood in the early 1930s.

He also traveled with them to Mexico for the filming of Eisenstein's unrealized project about the country.

He directed a pro-Stalin film, International (Интернационал), the following year and after a meeting with Stalin and Maxim Gorky, he embarked on making the first Soviet musical, Jolly Fellows, starring Leonid Utyosov and Lyubov Orlova, whom Aleksandrov later married (Orlova had been previously married to an economist who was arrested in 1930).

She starred in his most successful films: Circus, Volga-Volga, and Tanya.

Aleksandrov returned to the Soviet Union in 1932 under direct orders from Joseph Stalin.

He was awarded the Stalin Prizes for 1941 and 1950.

The Great Patriotic War (June 1941) came when Aleksandrov and his wife Orlova on vacation near Riga, Latvia.

They hurriedly returned to Moscow.

During one of the Nazi air raids, Aleksandrov had got a contusion and injured his spine.

He made a propaganda movie Fighting Film Collection #4 with Orlova singing a new version of the famous march from Jolly Fellows: "A horde of dark villains has attacked our laboring and jolly people..."

At the end of October 1941, with the other Mosfilm employees, Aleksandrov and Orlova were evacuated to Alma-Ata, Kazakh SSR.

Soon the director was sent to Azerbaijani Baku to run a local studio.

There Aleksandrov and his wife made a film A Family which was banned from being released in theatres for "poorly reflecting the struggle of the Soviet people against the German fascist invader".

In September 1943, Aleksandrov was ordered to return to Moscow as manager-in-chief of Mosfilm studio.

Aleksandrov's first postwar film was Springtime, another musical comedy starring Lyubov Orlova, as well as several other top-notch actors, including Nikolay Cherkasov, Erast Garin, and Faina Ranevskaya.

He also made a movie about the Russian composer Mikhail Glinka, obviously pushed by his Moscow Conservatory nurtured wife.

Popular public figures in the Soviet Union, Aleksandrov and Orlova had a difficult relationship with Stalin, who admired their films (he reportedly gave a print of Volga Volga as a present to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt) but frequently humiliated the pair.

He taught directing at VGIK from 1951 to 1957, Leonid Gaidai was among his students.

He also made several films about the years leading up to the Russian Revolution, including several about Vladimir Lenin.

Paradoxically, Aleksandrov found it harder to work in the more politically relaxed atmosphere called "Khrushchev Thaw" that followed Stalin's death.

He was even punished for his success during the Stalin era.

The level of harsh criticism about his movie Russian Souvenir (1960) was very derogatory, the satirical magazine Krokodil has published a feuilleton dedicated to the film, entitled "Is this specificity?"

Immediately, as if on command, critical articles began to appear in other publications.

The case went so far that Aleksandrov's colleagues were forced to defend the director.

Izvestia has published a letter in support of Aleksandrov, signed by Pyotr Kapitsa, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergey Obraztsov, Yuri Zavadsky and Sergei Yutkevich.

The attacks on Aleksandrov had stopped but after that, he basically stopped filming.

An edited version of the footage, known as ¡Que viva México!, was put together by Aleksandrov in 1979.