"Its scale was clear right away"

Memory of Leonid Bronery

On the morning of December 9, after a serious illness, theatrical and film actor Leonid Broneva died . He was 88 years old. Andrei Shemyakin, the head of the Guild of Kinovedes and Film Critics of Russia, told Medusa why Broneva, despite the widespread fame, actually deserved even more.

The contribution of Leonid Armor to the Soviet and Russian cinema I would compare with a long echo. The armor was never comprehended as the face of time, but he was always nearby and filled a very important space that could be called the “Warning Space”. On the one hand, he had an outstanding role of Velorov in the “Pokrovsky Gate”, on the other hand, a completely brilliant muller. They really recognized the armor only after the "seventeen moments of spring." A striking business, before this film - despite the fact that he starred a lot - there was no armor in the top five.

In the Seventeen Moments of Spring there is a brilliant phrase that Müller says, believing that he recruited the Stirlitz to his Gestapo: “Those who are now ten years old, who have experienced the hardships and horrors of war, shame of defeat, are not ours. It is useless to work with them. But those who are now one year or three are ours. ” The hero of the armor pronounces this phrase for the first time as if sincerely - but we do not know to the end, sincerely or not. So the Broneva showed us the infinity of acting, but showed not with the help of artistry, but internally getting used to his hero. I don’t know how he succeeded, but this is a sign of a great artist, underestimated in his case.

And what is he in the 1991 Ryazanovsky film “The Promised Heaven”! How he pronounces an involuntary anti -Semite, which is played by Vyacheslav the Innocent: "Why are you your friend of a Jew, so?" The Jew is played by Roman Kartsev. There is no longer a second of acting, it is not necessary there, because new times give a completely new degree of knowledge of themselves.

Leonid Broneva was still a wonderful theater actor, but it was these three works in the cinema that show the spectrum of his capabilities.

Armor, of course, an underestimated actor, but at the same time very beloved. Everyone knew him, there is a million jokes about Stirlitz and Müller. Everyone was very happy when he starred relatively recently in the "simple things" of Alexei Popogrebsky (2007), they said: "How great they remembered." But in general, it was believed that this is an actor of the episode, the second plan, without an internal topic - but completely brilliantly working in this second plan.

In order for roles to appear for his inner topic, a fundamentally different situation was needed. Take the hero Oleg Menshikov in the Pokrovsky Gate - it was not by chance that he played the main character there. He is a historian, he carries the truth of the future, he pronounces it, but at the same time all of himself brittle, consists of gestures, waves, smiles, nothing can be said about this person. And behind Bronov was the same experience that you can’t save - he was the son of the enemy of the people. Its scale was clear right away. He began to act in the mid-50s, in a turning point, but he did not act as an acting, like the face of time, he did not express him-then there were no films for him. He began very late, and time had to ripen before him.

Probably, many have yet to learn about the scale of the armor. I think he was not in the life during his lifetime, including folk love - to the extent that some other classics received it. The actors must be praised during life, the directors are different, but if not far from actors, this is a tragedy. Bronova was a man of enormous internal dignity. I’m not sure that he needed publicity, rather, the depth of comprehension and the adequacy of understanding what he did. I think this was not enough.

Recorded Sasha Sulim