Bondarchuk, Sergei Feodorovich (1920-1994)

Soviet actor and film director. In 1967 he directed one of the most lavish film productions ever undertaken, an eight-hour-long version of Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace, in which he also played the central role. Made as a self-conscious bid for Soviet cultural prestige, the film deployed 20,000 extras in its recreation of the Battle of Borodino, but hardly matched its physical scale in narrative command.

As actor Born near Odessa, Ukraine, Bondarchuk studied at the Theatre School in Rostov, southern Russia, before serving in the Red Army during World War II. He made his film acting debut in The Young Guard (1948), and soon became a leading player on the Soviet screen, notably in The Grasshopper (1955) and in the title role in Sergei Yutkevitch's film of Othello (1956).

As director Bondarchuk's flamboyant directing debut was Destiny of a Man (1959). It won widespread acclaim and led to the huge project of War and Peace. The undertaking was bankrolled by the government to an estimated equivalent of $100 million, but outside the USSR it was seen mainly in considerably cut versions. Bondarchuk went on to the Italo-Soviet co-production Waterloo (1970), in which battle scenes on an enormous scale were not matched by dramatic insight. His subsequent films, the last being a version of Aleksandr Pushkin's Boris Godunov (1986), tended to a heavy academicism. The onset of perestroika saw him removed from the post of secretary of the Russian Film-makers' Union, which he had occupied since 1971, though shortly before his death he was invited to return as vice-president.