Kheifets Leonid Efimovich: biography, family, creativity

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

Kheifets Leonid Efimovich is a theater director and director (he tried himself both as an actor and as a teacher), an active public figure, and since 1993, People's Artist of the Russian Federation. To this day, Leonid Kheifets is a professor at the Russian Academy of Theater Arts.

General information

Leonid Efimovich Kheifets will forever remain on the pages of Russian theatrical art as an exceptionally talented stage director. His works are loved by all people: both by the generation of the heyday of his work - the generation of people of the seventies, and by today's viewers, who are already very difficult to surprise with anything. And yet Heifetz succeeds brilliantly. His remastered classic plays and performances allow theatergoers to have a dialogue with great writers, absorb their thoughts and understand them.

Childhood

Leonid began his life journey in a country related to Russia - in Belarus. In 1934, on May 4, the future director was born in Minsk. Not a soul thenshe suspected what an active boy could grow up to be, like all children, who loved to play war games and walk out late. Even Leonid's parents were not ready for the fact that their son would turn away from the path familiar to everyone and choose a creative path - difficult, thorny, but giving many opportunities.

And so it happened in the future: instead of studying to the end at the Belarusian Polytechnic Institute, as his father wanted, Kheifets leaves this type of activity in his last years in order to enter the coveted institution.

Education by profession

Kheifets Leonid Efimovich submits documents to GITIS - a place where his directorial potential can be revealed like nowhere else. Naturally, young Kheifets is studying at the directing department, and it is here that his first steps towards the theater begin.

The GITIS course, in principle, could not seem easy to anyone, however, Kheifets coped with his studies easily, obviously feeling like a fish in water, on the first test shootings and assignments for young directors. At the end of the training, Leonid's teachers - A. D. Popov and M. O. Knebel - could rightly be proud of their student. His thesis in 1963 "The Highway to the Big Dipper" made a great impression on the admission committee of the institute.

First steps in directing

After graduating from GITIS with Highway to the Big Dipper, Leonid Efimovich Kheifets has already established himself as an aspiring director who is serious about his work. In the year of graduation, he was invited to the position of director inCentral Academic Theater of the Soviet Army (TsATSA). Gradually, enlisting the authority of his students and colleagues, in 1988 Leonid became the chief director of this theater.

During this time, Kheifets Leonid Efimovich staged such well-known paintings of that era as "The Death of Ivan the Terrible" and "Uncle Vanya". Moreover, both performances received positive reviews, and this is a great start for a novice director.

Love and theaters

After success at TsATSA, Leonid Kheifets transferred to the Maly Theatre, where his productions began to take on the drama inherent in the theatrical atmosphere. It was in this spirit that several performances based on the works of famous classical writers were staged. Among the most successful are the production of "The Fiesco Conspiracy in Genoa" by Friedrich Schiller, as well as the play "King Lear" - one of the standard works of William Shakespeare, which is still very often chosen for staging on stage. In 1981, on the stage of the Maly Theater, Kheifets revived the tradition of staging Russian prose - that year the play based on the work of the playwright Alexander Galin called "Retro" debuted.

In 1982, Kheifetz decided to try himself in a slightly different role - as a film director. The work of I. Goncharov "The Cliff" was claimed for the role of the film adaptation. And if everything was very clear with the male role of the main character, then the female images of the two sisters, Marfinka and Vera, were in question. For the role of the first, the director looked after an aspiring actress - she became Gundareva Natalia Georgievna.

This womanspontaneity and cheerfulness won the heart of Heifetz. After some time, they began to meet, and after finishing work on the film, they decided to live together, but there was nowhere. Kheifets Leonid Efimovich, for whom the family was one of the goals of life, dreamed of settling down, and therefore began to look for an apartment for him and Natalya. Finally, luck smiled at him, and a cozy apartment was found on Gorky Street, which was prestigious at that time. At first, everything turned out wonderfully for the couple: Natalya worked in the theater. V. Mayakovsky, and Kheifets staged performances in his theater. Since Leonid was a very sociable person, people always gathered in his house - friends, colleagues, actors, a troupe and many others. This is where the discord between the spouses began.

Kheifets Leonid Efimovich, whose wife was already tired of endless filming, gave his wife work at home, and in those crumbs of free time of rest that fell to her lot, Natalya was forced to take care of everyday life. He brought large companies, from which the actress got tired very quickly. The last straw was the good nature of the director, with which he once again left one of his friends to spend the night. Gundareva Natalya Georgievna could not come to terms with this - she asked her husband for a divorce. For Heifetz, the divorce was painful, however, having plunged into work, he suffered a little less. The man decided that his stage and the performances that he puts on it will be the best wife for him. So Kheifets Leonid Efimovich, whose personal life went downhill due to eternal employment, made his choice, preferring to devote himself to art without a trace.

SWith the arrival of Heifets, the theater seemed to perk up: now plays by Russian writers were being staged more and more often, the troupe was happy to play complex plots, and all the other directors woke up from their sleep and gradually began to prepare new productions for the next theatrical season.

Current activities

In 1988, Leonid Kheifets continued to look for a theater for his soul and chose the Mayakovsky Moscow Academic Theater (MATI). To this day, the director works in this temple of Melpomene, devoting all his strength to preparing a worthy replacement for himself - now Leonid Kheifets teaches young directors the art of staging. Moreover, this teaching experience for the director is not at all the first - in the 80s, Leonid Efimovich taught at the Higher Theater School. M. S. Shchepkina, and today, in addition to MATI, Kheifets is also engaged in pedagogy at the Russian Academy of Theater Arts.

His directorial work left an indelible mark on the activities of many theaters in Russia, so the name of this person, even after his death, will still sound there - behind his native theatrical scenes.