Grigori Aleksandrov

Grigory Vasilyevich Aleksandrov or Alexandrov (Russian: Григорий Васильевич Александров; 23 January, 1903 - 16 December, 1983) was a prominent Soviet film director who was named a People's Artist of the USSR in 1947 and a Hero of Socialist Labor in 1973. He was awarded the Stalin Prizes for 1941 and 1950.

Initially associated with Sergei Eisenstein, with whom he worked as a co-director, screenwriter and actor, Aleksandrov became a major director in his own right in the 1930s, when he directed Jolly Fellows and a string of other musical comedies starring his wife Lyubov Orlova.

Though Aleksandrov remained active until his death, his musicals, amongst the first made in the Soviet Union, remain his most popular films. They rival Ivan Pyryev's films as the most effective and light-hearted showcase ever designed for Stalinist Russia.

Early life and collaboration with Eisenstein

Aleksandrov was born Grigori Vasilyevich Murmorenko in Ekaterinburg, Russia in 1903. Starting at age nine, Aleksandrov worked odd jobs at the Ekaterinburg Opera Theater, eventually making his way to assistant director. He also pursued a musical education, studying violin at the Ekaterinburg Musical School, from which he graduated in 1917.

Aleksandrov came to Moscow after studying directing and briefly managing a movie theater. In 1921, while acting with the Proletcult Theatre he met a then 23-year-old Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein and Aleksandrov collaborated on several plays before Eisenstein made his first feature length film, Strike, which Aleksandrov co-wrote with Eisenstein, Ilya Kravchunovsky, and Valeryan Pletnyov. Next came Eisenstein's landmark The Battleship Potemkin, in which Aleksdanrov played Ippolit Giliarovsky. Aleksandrov co-directed Eisenstein's next two features, October: Ten Days That Shook the World and The General Line, which were also their last works in the silent era.

Along with Eisenstein's other major collaborator, cinematographer Eduard Tisse, Aleksandrov joined the director when he came to Hollywood in the early 1930s. He also traveled with them to Mexico for the filming of Eisenstein's unrealized project about the country. An edited version of the footage, known as ¡Qué viva México!, was put together by Aleksandrov in 1979.

Musical comedies

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A poster for Jolly Fellows.

Aleksandrov returned to the Soviet Union in 1932 under direct orders from Stalin. He directed a pro-Stalin film, International (Интернационал), the following year and after a meeting with Stalin and Maxim Gorky, he embarked on making the first Soviet musical, Jolly Fellows, starring Leonid Utyosov and Lyubov Orlova, whom Aleksandrov would later marry. Orlova had been previoulsy married to an economist who had been arrested in 1930. She would go on to star in his most successful films: Circus, Volga Volga, and Bright Path.

After World War II

Aleksdanrov's first postwar film was Spring, another musical comedy starring Lyubov Orlova, as well as several other top-notch actors, including Nikolai Cherkasov, Erast Garin, and Faina Ranevskaya.

Popular public figures in the Soviet Union, Aleksandrov and Orlova had a difficult relationship with Stalin, who admired their films (he reportedly gave a print of Volga Volga as a present to Franklin Delano Roosevelt) but frequently harassed the pair, imprisoning or executing several of their close friends. Paradoxically, Aleksandrov found it harder to work in the more politically relaxed atmosphere that followed Stalin's death. He taught directing at VGIK from 1951 to 1957 and made several films about the years leading up to the Russian Revolution, including several about Lenin.

His last narrative feature was Skvorets i Lira (Skoverts and Lira) (1973), which starred Orlova in her last role and was not released. Orlova passed away in 1975. In 1983, he worked on a documentary about the career of his late wife. He passed away in December of that year of a kidney infection and was buried next to Orlova in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.