Oleg Pavlovich Tabakov was born on August 17, 1935, and died on March 12, 2018.

He was a Soviet and Russian actor and the artistic director of the Moscow Art Theatre.

He studied at the Moscow Art Theatre School.

Following his graduation, Tabakov became one of the founding fathers of the Sovremennik Theatre.

Tabakov administrated the Sovremennik until 1982 when he moved to the Moscow Art Theatre, where he has played Molière and Salieri for over 20 years.

He persuaded his students to form the Tabakov Studio attached to the Moscow Art Theatre, in 1986.

Russian actors including Yevgeny Mironov, Sergey Bezrukov, Vladimir Mashkov, Andrey Smolyakov and Alexandre Marine, studied at the studio.

He also worked in numerous foreign countries, spreading his theatre’s ideals abroad.

His movie career paralleled the theatrical.

Tabakov was featured in Grigori Chukhrai’s Clear Skies (1961), Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace (1966–67), TV series Seventeen Instants of Spring (1973) and D’Artagnan and Three Musketeers (1978), the Academy Award-winning Moscow Does Not Believe In Tears (1980), Nikita Mikhalkov’s Oblomov (1981) and Dark Eyes (1986), and the mock western A Man from the Boulevard des Capuchines (1987), among others.

He also did voice-overs.

He died in Moscow, Russia at 82 years old.