Emil Loteanu: biography, personal life, films, photos

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

They say that directing is not just a profession, but a way of life. This statement is one hundred percent correct regarding Emil Loteanu. Biography, personal life, films that he made will be analyzed in this short essay.

Among those who lived in the Soviet Union, there is hardly a person who has not seen the works of the great director. This is “The camp goes to the sky”, and “My affectionate and gentle beast”, and “Lautars”. But Loteanu also wrote scripts for all his films, and for some of them he also wrote poetry! The director's star shone for 15 years.

He was awarded many cinema prizes, and was also awarded the title of People's Artist of the RSFSR. Loteanu lived a long and interesting life, not without difficulties. And we invite you to familiarize yourself with its main milestones.

Emil Loteanu: biography. Early years

Ukrainian blood flowed in the director's veins. re althe surname of his father, the son of a miller, who was originally from Bukovina, is Lototsky. Emil was the eldest child in the family. He was born in 1936 on November 6 in the Bessarabian village of Klokushna.

Now this settlement is part of Moldova, but then it was the territory of the Kingdom of Romania. The parents of the future director were teachers. Father Vladimir taught physics. Mother Tatiana was a Romanian language teacher.

When Soviet troops entered Bukovina and Bessarabia, the family fled to Bucharest. But Emil's parents soon broke up. The boy stayed with his father. He graduated from the gymnasium in Bucharest and published his first collection of poems there, Sovremennik. As a teenager, he watched the American western "Stagecoach" and has since become addicted to cinema.

Emil lost his father early. Since the parents parted in a very bad relationship and did not maintain contact with each other, the boy could not find his mother. Then in 1953 he decided to move to the USSR - first to Chisinau, and then to Moscow.

Vocational education

Everything in the image of Emil Loteanu betrayed in him a "Western" person. He was fashionably dressed, and most importantly, he behaved uninhibitedly and freely. First of all, he conquered new acquaintances with his poetry. But Loteanu raved about cinema.

Arriving in Moscow, he immediately applied for the acting department of the Moscow Art Theater School. Imagine his surprise when the ticket he pulled out at the entrance exam was about the movie "Stagecoach". Emil saw this as a sign from above.

Before entering the Moscow Art Theater School (and being eligible forhostel), Loteanu slept in warehouses and even on the street. But after studying acting for two years, Emil realized that this profession was not for him.

He transferred to the directing department at VGIK. His teachers were such celebrities as Yuri Genika and Grigory Roshal. At the beginning of his acting education, Loteanu performed on the stage of the Pushkin Drama Theater. In 1962, he successfully graduated from the directing department of VGIK.

Beginning of professional activity

According to the distribution of graduate Emil Loteanu, they were sent to Chisinau to the Moldova-film studio. There, the young director begins filming the heroic-pathetic film "Wait for us at dawn" (1963).

The script about the activities of communist revolutionaries was frankly boring, and neither an interesting director's decision nor an international team of actors helped the film (V. Panarin, I. Gutsu, D. Karachobanu, I. Shkurya took part in the filming).

But Loteanu's next work, Krasnye Polyany (1966), aroused the interest of the mass audience. Indeed, against the backdrop of socialist reality and collective farm workdays, a love melodrama unfolded.

The director has long been looking for the right type for the main character - the beautiful Joanna. And suddenly I found him … at a trolleybus stop. Svetlana Andreevna Fomicheva was waiting for the car to go to apply to the Kishinev University for the law faculty. Lotyanu invited her to act in films. He specially went to B alti, where the parents of an underage girl lived, charmed them and persuaded them to agree to their daughter becoming an actress. So he gave way to the cinemaSvetlana Toma (pseudonym Fomicheva).

Lautars

"Krasnye polyany" were awarded several prizes of the Soviet republics. But with his subsequent films, Emil Loteanu crossed the line and entered the international arena of cinema. In the late 60s, the director took on a difficult topic, deciding to tell about the fate of Moldovan itinerant musicians.

The film "Lautary", released in 1971, was called by many critics a film poem. And this is no coincidence. Loteanu was one of the first to create the soundtrack of the film, inviting the Moldavian composer Eugen Dogu for this.

The soundtrack was written specifically for the script. The director was not afraid of excessive national identity (which at that time could easily be reclassified into nationalism, as happened with Parajanov). The film "Lautary" was recognized not only in the USSR, but also abroad.

He won the Silver Shell, the Silver Nymph in Naples, the Special Jury Award at the San Sebastian Film Festival and the Diploma from the Orvieto Film Festival.

The camp goes to the sky

At that time, promising "national cadres" immediately moved to live in the capital of the country. As soon as the photos of Emil Loteanu appeared among the winners of international film festivals, the director received an invitation to work on the main Soviet film set, Mosfilm.

He moved to the capital in 1973. But even in Moscow, Loteanu did not forget his Bessarabian homeland. He proceeded to film adaptation of M. Gorky's story "Makar Chudra" andcreated a stunning film "The camp goes to the sky", which entered the golden fund of Soviet cinema. In the film, the director managed to intertwine a love story with the manners and life of the Bessarabian Roma of the late 19th century.

The success of the film was due not only to an interesting topic, but also to the scrupulousness of the director. Loteanu traveled all over the Soviet Union to recruit simple Gypsy extras. And to perform authentic songs, he had to get to Transbaikalia, where the Buzylev Roma family lived.

To create the soundtrack, Loteanu invited the composer E. Doga, and Svetlana Toma for the main female role. Released in 1976, the film attracted 65 million viewers and brought the director awards in Prague, Belgrade and San Sebastian.

My sweet and gentle beast

During his ten-year work at Mosfilm, Lotyanu made many famous films. Immediately after the release of "The Camp Goes to the Sky", the director proceeds to another film adaptation, this time of Chekhov's story "Drama on the Hunt".

For his film "My Sweet and Gentle Beast" Loteanu wanted to find a type that would be similar to the star beauty of those years - fashion model Audrey Hepburn. Following this order, the director's assistant traveled all over the Union until she found the required image in the choreographic school of Voronezh.

Aspiring ballerina Galina Belyaeva did not even think about a career in cinema. But Lotyanu, with his characteristic charm and perseverance, is accepted, as before with Svetlana Toma, to mold a screen star out of a student. She works on the same platform with suchcelebrities like Leonid Markov, Kirill Lavrov and Oleg Yankovsky.

Eugen Dogu celebrates the film even more with his w altz, which has become a classic of contemporary symphonic music. Galina Belyaeva and Emil Lotyanu became lovers on the set of this picture, and then got married. "My sweet and gentle beast" became a hit in the late 70s. In 1978 he competed at the Cannes IFF.

Other movies

The director's last work in Moscow, which received universal recognition, was a picture about the great Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova. The main role, of course, was played by the muse and wife of Emil Loteanu, Galina Belyaeva.

Composer Eugene Dogu re-arranged various works by Saint-Saens especially for the film. In 1984, this painting was awarded a special award at Oxford.

Later, a five-episode television biopic of the same name appeared. In the late 80s, the director decided to return to Chisinau. At the "Moldova-Film" studio, he will screen the poem "Luceafarul" by the famous poet Mihai Eminescu.

On the same set he shoots the film "The Shell" (1993), where his son Emil plays. This is the last known work of the master. In it, he protests against the advent of a new era.

The ruthless city with its laws of the market is advancing on the old quarter, inhabited by naive artists and beautiful-hearted poets. The fragile paradise was destroyed… As was the director's he alth.

End of life

The collapse of the Soviet Union had a negative impact on the state of the Moldovancinematography, and on the economy of the independent republic as a whole. Films were no longer made, and Emil Loteanu, in order to earn a living, taught at the Chisinau Institute of Arts for students - future theater actors.

In the mid-90s, the director again moved to Moscow. There he writes the script for the film "Yar" about the famous restaurant, where famous people of Russia of that era visited at the beginning of the 20th century. But there were no state funds for staging the film, and the sponsors were not interested in this topic. Loteanu was nervous, which did not add to his he alth.

In 1998, he decided to move from the set to the stage. At the Moscow Art Theatre. M. Gorky, he puts on the play “All yours, Antosha Chekhonte” based on two stories by Chekhov “The Wedding” and “The Bear”.

Death of a director

When funds were found for the shooting of Yar, Loteanu went to Bulgaria to look for nature. But at Sofia airport, he suddenly became ill. In a coma, he was taken to a hospital in Moscow.

For a month, doctors unsuccessfully fought for his life. But Loteanu was diagnosed with cancer in the last stage. The famous director died on April 18, 2003. He is buried at the Vagankovsky cemetery in Moscow.

Emil Loteanu: personal life

The director's first muse and life partner was Svetlana Toma. She was 12 years younger than her husband. The couple did not live in a civil marriage for long. Soon Svetlana went to the young actor O. Lachin.

Galina Belyaeva became Lotyan's second chosen one. She gave her husband a son, who was named after his father.

Friends noticed that all of Emil Loteanu's wives were much younger than him. Belyaeva was separated from the director's age by as much as 25 years. But this was not the limit. After the actress left Loteanu, he met his third - and last - love.

Slovak actress Petra Filchakova was exactly half a century younger than him. Lotyanu invited her to the shooting of Yar. But work on the film, which began in early 2003, was not completed.