Biography

Petr (Peter) Shelokhonov was born in 1929, in Hajduki, Wilno Voivodeship, then part of Poland (now Belarus). His ancestors came from Poland, from Lithuania, and from Ukraine. Petr was destined to practice medicine, like his father, but his fate was changed by war. He survived the German and Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, when his birthplace was annexed by the Soviets and became a battleground that was scorched by German and Soviet armies in 1941-1944. The Nazis arrested Petr and he was severely wounded in his forehead but he escaped and survived. Then he joined the partisans resistance in the woods.

There Petr Shelokhonov had his first acting experience. He was performing parodies of Hitler and the Nazis to his fellow partisans. His performances helped lift their spirits in a time when they were struggling to survive. This experience accentuated his humble, modest character. The scar on his forehead, the mark of war, made his acting career seem like an impossible dream; but Petr was determined. He made puppets and a screen, and worked in his own puppet theater from 1943 - 1945. In his show titled "Peter and the Wolf" he managed to lead four puppets with four voices, and also played the accordion. He performed for bread and rare food packages from the American airlift, and he was very lucky to survive until the end of WWII.

In 1945 he became a piano student at the Kiev Conservatory of Music, he also played the accordion on stage. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff were his favorites as well as the music of Glenn Miller, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and other stars from the Voice of America radio shows. Eventually he became a stand-up comedian in Leningrad. There, in 1949, he was drafted in the Red Navy and served in the Baltic Fleet for five years under dictator Stalin. There he was arrested for telling a political joke and was detained in a strict guardhouse. After the death of Stalin, Shelokhonov was discharged from service. He managed to survive the roughest realities of life under Soviet dictatorship; but when his free spirited humor angered the hard liners again, many doors closed. After that, Petr's acting career was limited to Siberia. He moved to the Siberian city of Irkutsk and graduated from Irkutsk Drama School.

He became a member of the troupe at Irkutsk Drama Theater in the 1950s, then joined the Chekhov's Drama Theatre in the city of Taganrog in the 1960s, then, upon invitation from Lenfilm Studios, he returned to Leningrad in 1968. There, after a few successful appearances on television, he made his big screen debut as spy Sotnikov in "Hidden Enemy"/"No Amnesty" in which Petr Shelokhonov played a foreign spy wearing a Soviet uniform and killing people. When the movie was released in January 1969, a real Red Army officer wearing a uniform approached the Moscow Kremlin and made several gun shots trying to kill the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Immediately after this attack on the Soviet leader, the movie "Hidden Enemy"/"No Amnesty" was banned, all film copies were destroyed by the Soviet government, and Petr Shelokhonov together with the other filmmakers were censored. A replacement film Razvyazka (1970) was made under supervision from Soviet special agents who ordered that now the foreign spy in the movie must be dressed in a white shirt to be visible for moviegoers in the Soviet Union. Petr Shelokhonov played that foreign spy in a white shirt, albeit he survived again thanks to his talent, but Soviet censorship restricted him from leading roles. He spent most of his professional acting career working for film studios in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev and Odessa.

Petr Shelokhonov played leading and supporting roles in Russian and international films, and his filmography includes over 80 roles in film and on television. His film and stage partners were such actors as Mikhail Boyarskiy, Kirill Lavrov, Ivan Krasko, Pavel Luspekayev, Efim Kopelian, Sergey Boyarskiy, Nikolay Boyarskiy, Natalya Fateeva, Andrey Myagkov, Sophie Marceau, Sean Bean, and other stars. He also played over 100 roles on stage in Russian and International theater productions. He played the leading role (Sam) in Photo Finish, written and directed by Peter Ustinov.

Petr Shelokhonov was designated Honorable Actor of Russia (1979). He passed away in 1999, and was laid to rest in St. Petersburg, Russia. Books about him were published in Russia and in the USA.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Dmitri Ivaneev

Petr Shelokhonov was a stage and film actor who made his acting debut after he was wounded in the face during the Second World War. He performed parodies of Hitler and the Nazis to his fellow survivors. After the war he was drafted in the Red Navy and served for five years with the Baltic Fleet. There he was giving performances on stage and on radio shows. His creativity was too bold and independent for the Soviet regime, he was censored during the 1950s and had to live in Siberia, but even there he continued acting and eventually made a remarkable acting career.

The most intriguing secret about Russian culture and history is how under a thousand years of autocracy and dictatorship, such amazing men and women have emerged. There is a painting from Soviet times that illustrates this. Across a bleak land a black paved road stretches straight to the horizon, a dark silhouette of a modern high-rise city. Pushing up through the cracks in this road are leaves of grass and budding flowers. Those vibrant plants reaching for light through the cracks represent the great writers, poets, composers, painters, filmmakers, and other people of the performing arts. We know the names of a many, but there were and are so many more talents in Russia who kept being creative under the pressure from the Soviet regime, and their humble work was not wasted, as they kept the great culture alive.

Petr Shelokhonov was one of them. I marveled at these artists in the secret lofts, their crumbling dachas, or just the privacy of the kitchen table; I marveled at what they were happily doing in the ruins of the Soviet Union - these budding plants. We know the strife of these champions of freedom. The work of writers and actors got focused attention from the Soviet guardians of their power. I have managed a business in Russia and lived there. I have met more than few of these often surviving humble greats.

His big screen debut was in 1968, in the film titled "Hidden Enemy" - playing on the fact that the good looking western spy, played by Petr Shelokhonov, was surreptitiously killing people and infiltrating the Soviet rank and file while he wore a Soviet captain uniform. The film release coincided with the real life attack on the Soviet leader Brezhnev in January of 1969, by an armed man who penetrated the Kremlin wearing Soviet uniform. Immediately the film "Hidden Enemy" was renamed "No Amnesty" and banned as anti-Soviet. All film copies and film negatives and other working materials for "Hidden Enemy"/"No Amnesty" were destroyed under control from Soviet agents and Petr Shelokhonov was censored. The new replacement film was made during 1969 and released in 1970 titled Razvyazka (1970) - in it the spy, played again by Petr Shelokhonov, was now wearing a white shirt instead of a Soviet uniform, because the Soviet KGB ordered the filmmakers to do such changes.

In St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1996, I witnessed the filming of Anna Karenina (1997) in which Petr Shelokhonov appeared opposite Sophie Marceau and Sean Bean. He was cast in over 90 movies, such as, co-starring as Cossack Severian Ulybin in a three-hour epic film Dauriya (1972), starring as businessman Sergey Peresada in "Reprisal" aka Otvetnaya mera (1975), a political drama about the cold war. Only a few of his films are available today, while many other works did not survive the turbulent events of Soviet and Russian regimes. In many roles he had to play a Soviet officer, or a revolutionary and did so with tongue-in-cheek as he also listened to the opposite side, such as the BBC, Voice of America, and other international sources.

It was his love of freedom that led him to take the death-defying chances necessary to assure his acting career, and to create a range of characters marked by truth, depth, and beauty. Photographs of his stage roles show a variety of characters displaying nuanced emotions and a remarkable range. In the course of his career spanning 50 years, Petr Shelokhonov worked in theatre, in film, and on television, and played over 150 characters from different periods and cultures, ranging from the Shakespearean prince Hamlet, to the Soviet dictator Lenin.

The actor created such a range of characters thanks to his gift of transformation. He was equally convincing delivering refined noblesse and reserved energy of passion, with deep penetration in the gist of each character, entertaining the viewer with his charm and mastery of acting, and performing with the full power of his talent.

We Americans often don't appreciate the cultural under-structure of the rest of the world. European, Russian, Asian, African, and Mediterranean peoples live with a highly original, rich, and multi-dimensional worlds of a vertical culture, while many of us in America live in a horizontal culture. But in the rest of the world, the centuries of language, geography, religion, and resulting social, political, and economic strains make a special environment conducive to breeding cultural creatives.

Petr Shelokhonov was surely one of these who elegantly portrayed for us the cultural heritages of Europe and Russia.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Fred Andresen