Sergey Filippov

Biography

Filippov was born in Saratov. His father was a factory turner, his mother a dressmaker. Expelled from school for bad behaviour (involving, reportedly, dangerous experiments in the cabinet of a chemistry teacher), he tried several jobs (a baker’s boy, a carpenter, a turner) before joining a ballet studio, which in 1929 sent him to Moscow for further education.

Filippov enrolled into the recently formed Popular Music and Circus college which he graduated in 1933 to join the Moscow Ballet and Opera Theatre troupe. The heart problem forced Filippov to drop out, though; soon he found himself in the Saint Petersburg Comedy Theatre, led by Nikolai Akimov, where he became one of the leading actors.

Career in film

In 1937 Sergey Filippov made his debut on big screen, playing a Finnish soldier in For Soviet Motherland. 1939-1940 saw Filippov cast in several major movies, playing an enemy saboteur (Zarkhi and Kheifits' Member of the Government), provision store wrecker in Kozintsev and Trauberg's The Vyborg Side, a railroad worker in Arinka by Kosheverova and Muzykant, a sailor anarchist in Sergey Yutkevich's Yakov Sverdlov. Both directors and critics praised Filippov's improvisational talent as well as plasticity and physical strength, which allowed him to perform dangerous stunts with ease.

The cultural climate in the late-1941 USSR was hardly conducive for eccentric comedy, yet Klimenty Mints's Adventures of Korzinkina with Yanina Zhejmo in the lead, became hugely popular. Filippov's part (that of a reciter, performing Lermontov's Death of Gladiator on stage, while tormented by a mouse inside his jacket) was small but unforgettable. Sergey Yutkevich in one of his articles called the actor 'an ideal buffoon'.

In the 1940s Filippov created a gallery of crooks, loafers and eccentrics on screen. Well-versed in the history of film, he never copied his favourite comics. "I usually play the Soviet people, my contemporaries, so in each character I look for a social motif," he once said. One of his best-known parts of the time was that of a crooked shop director Polzikov in Night Patrol.

Mid-1950s saw another rise in Filippov's popularity. His parts were small but memorable: silly and arrogant Almazov in The Tiger Trainer, absurdly dull Znanie lecturer in Eldar Ryazanov's Carnival Night, two-faced official Komarinsky in The Girl Without Address. In retrospect critics deplored the unadventurous way Filippov's comical gift had been exploited by directors, who often used his very presence to save otherwise mediocre scenes or films. According to actress Lyubov Tishchenko, Filippov's major grievance in his latter years was never having received a tragic role he was craving for. "I even cried as I learned that it was Yuri Nikulin who'd got the lead in When the Trees Were Tall", he once reportedly said.

In 1965 Filippov underwent a brain tumor removal. He continued to work with the same fervent zeal, though. In 1971, he starred as Kisa Vorobyaninov, next to Archil Gomiashvili's Ostap Bender in Leonid Gaiday's highly popular adaptation of Ilf and Petrov's The Twelve Chairs. This proved to be the peak of his career. In 1974 the actor was awarded the People's Artist of the RSFSR title.

Death

In the 1980s Filippov's health began to decline. After his second wife, Antonina Golubeva, who was thirteen years his senior, died in 1989, he was left alone, disabled and destitute. Filippov died of lung cancer on or around 19 April 1990, aged 77. His body was not discovered until two weeks later. Lenfilm refused to subsidise any funeral service and (according to fellow comedy star Evgeny Morgunov) it was Alexander Demyanenko who personally collected the sum needed. Filippov was interred in Saint Petersburg Severnoye Cemetery.

Private life

Filippov's first wife was the ballet dancer Alevtina Gorinovich, with whom he fathered a son, Yuri Sergeyevich Filippov. In the early 1950s, soon after his first marriage ended in divorce, Filippov remarried, to Antonina Golubeva (1899–1989), a children writer.