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"There was a lot of maleness in him": bright roles and hit films by Mikhail Kozakov
"The first handsome man of Soviet cinema" - he really deserved it as an actor and director, possessing a multifaceted talent, fantastic charm, charisma, subtle mind and a sharp sense of humor. Valentin Gaft joked about Mikhail Kazakov in an epigram, which is a very accurate characterization.
He became a favorite of the audience after the films "Murders on Dante Street" and "Amphibian Man". It was his powerful, albeit somewhat negative, charm that made him an absolute star. The screen villain played by Kozakov was absolutely irresistible. It seemed that fate had given him all the trump cards. He was incredibly in demand in the theater (he played Hamlet in "Mayakovka") and received the most striking roles in cinema.
But simply being an actor, plastic in someone else's hands, seemed insufficient to him. And he takes on the role of a reader, mixing the theater stage and the variety show. If you ask which of the Soviet artists felt, understood and expressed poetry best, the answer is unambiguous: Kozakov. In their performances, Pushkin, Pasternak, Brodsky broke away from the academic format, and long-familiar lines sounded like the direct speech of the actor himself, as if he trusted us with the secrets of his soul.
And, of course, "Pokrovskie Vorota" is a classic and an absolute hit of the golden fund of cinema. The director clearly captured the spirit of the times, a mixture of "the path to novelty" and nostalgia for the past. The yearning adult Kostya Romin, played by Mikhail Mikhailovich himself, looked somewhat alien in the finale of the film. (Recall that playwright Leonid Zorin prepared a tragic fate for his hero: in one of the following plays, he committed suicide, and Kozakov probably knew about it.)
He treated both the material and the characters with care and love. When he invited Ekaterina Vasilyeva to play Klara Tsakhanasyan, he tactfully removed the word "old" from the film's title. It turned out to be simply "The Lady's Visit." Performing "The Shadow," he came up with bright dance inserts especially for Konstantin Raikin and turned Shvartsev's play into a real musical, revealing the actor's full plastic talent.
Seeing the rise of commercial and studio theatre, he happily joined the companies, performing in Moscow and Israel, but was never able to move to the promised land. He was closely connected with Russian literature. He performed in one-man shows, held the audience for almost three hours, sometimes worked a lot, but always retained his regal elegance and amazing charm, even in the last years of his life.
When I learned that I was seriously ill, I did not stop smoking cigarettes secretly, although the doctors forbade me. I never parted with my famous pipes. He staged plays based on the poems of Brodsky and Akhmatova, recorded them as audio readings, continued to meet with the audience and tried not to miss the innovative projects of his fellow artists, especially in the experimental genre.