Ryazanov is best known for his style of comedy which satirized Soviet life, with many of his movies featuring a romantic storyline. On November 21, the director once again ended up at a Moscow clinic.
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Arguably Russia’s favourite director, millions know his iconic films from the 1960s and 1970s off by heart.
His films ridiculed Soviet bureaucracy and lifestyle, but the lightness of his satires helped him dodge Communist censorship. Eldar Ryazanov, one of the most popular film directors of the Soviet era whose comedies captured the unique absurdities of life under Communism, died today aged 88, family and colleagues said.
Since the early Nineteen Fifties, Ryazanov additionally wrote scripts and briefly appeared in his movies, often enjoying unsympathetic strangers whose presence added one other ironic dimension to the plot.
Years after the 1991 Soviet collapse, he acknowledged that fear of the Soviet government had dominated his life.
In the a year ago, Ryazanov was hospitalized several times. His main hit was the extremely popular 1975 TV-movie “Ironiya sidby, ili s lyogkim parom!” It is still shown every New Year’s Eve as a tradition in the countries of the former Soviet Union. The real owner is a fair-haired, blue-eyed schoolteacher engaged to a boring bureaucratic type. She finds the hung-over intruder on her couch and helps him understand he’s 500 miles away from his residence.
A native of the Volga region city of Samara, Ryazanov graduated from Moscow’s National State Cinema Institute (VGIK) in 1950.
“The Carnival Night” is a Soviet musical film which was released in 1956. His forays into period dramas – such as “The Cruel Romance”, his 1984 film about a 19th century Russian woman from an impoverished aristocratic family who is shot dead by her jealous fiancé – won him critical praise. His movies after the Soviet collapse have been far much less profitable and introduced combined evaluations.
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Ryazanov leaves behind his wife, a daughter and a grandson from his second marriage.
