Actor Nikolai Grinko: biography, personal life, family, films

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

The actor Nikolai Grinko had a great variety of roles throughout his career. However, the vast majority of viewers (especially younger ones) remembered him as Professor Gromov from "The Adventures of Electronics" or Papa Carlo from "Pinocchio". What other roles did the artist play, how did he choose this path in general?

Start

Little is known about the early years in the life of Nikolai Grinko. By the way, it is correct to call him Mykola: after all, this artist is Ukrainian, and this is exactly how the Ukrainian version of the name Mykola sounds.

He was born in the twentieth year of the last century in Ukraine, in a family that was directly related to acting. His father Grigory himself was an artist, while his mother worked as an assistant director. From childhood, little Kolya was completely immersed in the amazing atmosphere of creativity, theatrical life, and play. Naturally, he could not help but dream of such a field of activity for himself, all the more so, he had a clear inclination for acting. And Nikolai not only dreamed, but alsoI was going to enter the appropriate institute in order to receive the necessary education. However, at that time, the dreams of a young man were not destined to come true. The war broke out, and Nikolai Grinko went to the front.

On the roads of the Great Patriotic War

It's hard to say whether Nikolai Grigorievich Grinko was lucky - after all, he spent all four long war years at the front. Although, on the other hand, he was probably still lucky: after all, in all the years of the war, he never received any really significant injury. Fate spared him, kept him for future roles and for the viewer.

Nikolai served in the airfield maintenance battalion, or more precisely, he was a radio operator on bombers. However, even in this difficult time, Grinko did not forget about his dream of becoming an actor, and, we repeat, he definitely had talent and a predisposition for acting. It was he, and not anyone else, who was the Komsomol organizer in his battalion, carried out active organizational work, and was engaged in amateur art activities. For this, he was later even awarded a separate medal. And Nikolai Grigorievich had the rank of foreman, with him he ended the war in 1945.

New life

After the war, everyone literally began a new life. Our hero was no exception - a blank page opened in the biography of Nikolai Grinko. And he took advantage of this page in order to finally realize his long-standing dream - to become an actor. Starting from the forty-sixth year of the last century, Nikolai Grigorievich, to whomthen was only twenty-six years old, began to work in the Zaporozhye Drama Theater.

There were a lot of things to do, but there were not enough people, and therefore Nikolai performed several functions at once - and managed to play roles first as a secondary actor, and then as a presenter, and was an assistant director - for nothing without education, but a natural gift rescued. However, Grinko did not remain without education for long - just three years later, in forty-ninth, he graduated from the theater studio at the aforementioned theater.

Further career

Having plunged headlong into the theatrical life, into the world of creativity and acting, Grinko was no longer going to emerge from there. As he did not initially intend to act in films - or rather, not only did not intend to, but simply did not think about it, devoting himself entirely to the art of theater. However, as you know, life turned in such a way that Nikolai nevertheless got into the cinema … And this happened in 1951, almost by accident. Grinko then got a very small role in the historical biopic "Taras Shevchenko" (Igor Savchenko shot the picture). Obviously, Nikolai did well, because after the release of the tape, he began to receive all the new offers.

However, we will return to this conversation a little later. In the meantime, it is worth saying that since 1955 Grinko has been playing and directing the variety orchestra of Kyiv called "Dnipro". Nikolai Grigorievich at one time spent a lot of time on the stage: he worked as an entertainer and sangplayful verses, and generally performed all sorts of entertaining numbers to the delight of the Zaporizhzhya public. But all this was only at the beginning of the acting path. And then the movie happened.

First film roles

As already mentioned, the first role of Nikolai Grinko was very tiny, his name is not even in the credits of the picture. After that, the actor did not act in films for some time, but the new experience inspired him so much that by 1956 Grinko moved to Kyiv and became an actor in the Kyiv film studio. From that moment, a new round began both in the life and work of Nikolai Grigorievich.

In the same fifty-sixth year, Grinko appeared on the big screens in two tapes at once - "There is such a guy" and "Pavel Korchagin". However, both of his roles were again small. But the first serious role awaited Grinko in the sixty-first: in the film "The World to the Incoming" he played an American soldier, so much so that he received a special prize at the Venice Film Festival for this work - a car. More precisely, I should have received it, but "didn't grow together".

Tarkovsky's Talisman

Among the films of Nikolai Grinko, a considerable number of those whose authorship belongs to Andrei Tarkovsky. And this is no coincidence: from the very first picture in which Grinko appeared at Tarkovsky's (it was the film "Ivan's Childhood", released in 1962), they somehow imbued each other: the director considered Nikolai Grigorievich his talisman and invited him to many projects, the same, in theirturn, immensely respected Tarkovsky and looked forward to the release of each of his new films.

It is interesting that at first Grinko did not want to act in "Ivan's Childhood", mistakenly believing that this was an uninteresting idea, but in the end he succumbed to the persuasion of the director's assistants. And having succumbed, he did not regret it.

Other than the above

What else was there in Grinko's stage life besides Tarkovsky's films? There were the titles of Honored and People's Artist of the Ukrainian SSR (1969 and 1973, respectively), there were more than one hundred and fifty (!) Various paintings. His heroes were different, but Grinko brought his kindness, gentleness, wisdom and charm to the features of each of his characters.

Perhaps he would have played many more roles, and perhaps the main role of his life, which every artist is waiting for, he never did. Illness prevented everything: Nikolai Grigorievich died at less than sixty-nine from leukemia. He is buried in Kyiv.

Private life

The personal life of Nikolai Grinko is not replete with shocking details that can be savored and are of interest to the yellow press. He was married twice. The first marriage did not last very long, Grinko's wife was an actress of the same Zaporozhye Drama Theater, where he himself played after the war. With his second wife, Aisha, the actor met in the Kiev Orchestra in 1957. Their marriage was quite happy and lasted until the death of the artist. The couple had no children.

Such was lifeand the creative fate of a wonderful, talented artist - Nikolai Grinko.