He was preparing to become a military translator, but Nikita Khrushchev closed the Military Institute of Foreign Languages, and Nikolai Gubenko went to the artists. The thought comes: according to the fate of our actors, you can trace the history of the country.
Even the historical birth date of Nicholas is 1941, the year the Great Patriotic War began. His father died before the birth of his son, and his mother was hanged by the Nazis in 1942. She gave birth to a son in the catacombs, where the inhabitants of Odessa were hiding from enemy raids.
Grandfather and grandmother took up four orphaned children of Gubenko, but it was hard for them to feed such a family, and soon Nikolai was sent to an orphanage, and then transferred to Suvorov School, where he studied English.
As a schoolboy, he disappeared into the drama circle, studied in a dance studio, and he was accepted into the Odessa Youth Theater - first as a working stage, later there were episodic roles.
And then there was VGIK, graduated in 1964 - Sergey Gerasimov's chick became an artist of the Taganka Theater for four years. He played the roles of Pechorin, Emelyan Pugachev, Godunov and other characters. He went on stage with the stars: Vladimir Vysotsky, Leonid Filatov, Valery Zolotukhin, Alla Demidova and others. He left the theater to unlearn a director at the same VGIK.
Then he was both the main director and the artistic director of this theater, and directed the "Taganka Commonwealth of Actors" theater.
Movie career
Immediately after graduating from VGIK in 1964, Nikolai Gubenko began acting in films, and these were four paintings at once. And immediately success - the film "I am twenty years old" received a special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival.
However, the first notable work was his role in the movie "The Last Con" - where Nikolai played the crook Petya Dachnikova.
Already in 1968, viewers saw the first directorial work of Gubenko: "The Forbidden Zone", "From the Life of Vacationers", "Wounded". In his last work, he was both a screenwriter and director. We can say that this is an autobiographical film about the post-war childhood of Nikolai in the conditions of an orphanage.
Social and political activities
Perhaps this is a separate issue, if we talk about the life of Nikolai Gubenko. As an indifferent person, he could not stay away from the public life of the country, from culture as a whole. It is impossible to list all spheres of activity of Gubenko, we can only say that he was the last Minister of Culture in the USSR, a State Duma deputy from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, was a member of the Council under the President of the Russian Federation for Culture and Art, and was Deputy Chairman of the Moscow City Duma.
