Vasily Livanov - Biography

Biography

Livanov's father, Boris Livanov, was a prominent actor of the Moscow Art Theatre. Vasily was brought up in the artistic milieu, as many Soviet/Russian actors (such as Olga Knipper and Alla Tarasova) worked with his father and frequented the Livanov house.

Livanov graduated from the Vakhtangov Theatre school and started his film career in 1959. His breakthrough role came in the 1963 adaptation of Vasily Aksyonov's Colleagues, in which he co-starred with Vasily Lanovoy and Oleg Anofriev.

Livanov's rather erratic bohemian lifestyle derailed his film career. He made very few appearances in the movies produced in the late 1960s and 1970s, using his newly acquired hoarse voice to become the voice behind multiple popular Soviet cartoon characters – Karlsson-on-the-Roof, Gena the Crocodile, Udav (the snake) from 38 Parrots (Russian: 38 попугаев). His other contribution to the Soyuzmultfilm cartoon industry was co-writing the screenplay for the animated film Town Musicians of Bremen, a modernised adaptation of the homonymous folktale. He also directed a few animated films, e.g. The Blue Bird.

In the late 1970s and in the 1980s, Livanov returned to film stardom in what became the greatest success of his acting career: the role of Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles and other Holmes TV series directed by Igor Maslennikov.

Sherlock Holmes short stories and novels that were featured in Livanov's movies included:

• A Study in Scarlet,
• The Adventure of the Speckled Band,
• The Hound of the Baskervilles,
• The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,
• The Adventure of the Final Problem,
• The Adventure of the Empty House,
• A Scandal in Bohemia,
• The Sign of Four,
• The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb,
• The Adventure of the Second Stain,
• The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans, and
• His Last Bow

Those movies were filmed between 1979 and 1986, with the latter four stories forming the plot of a standalone big-screen feature entitled The 20th Century Begins also known as The Twentieth Century Approaches. Vasily Livanov played Sherlock Holmes and Vitaly Solomin played Doctor Watson.

The daughter of Arthur Conan Doyle once commented that her father would approve Livanov as Holmes.

On 20 February 2006 Livanov became an Honorary MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) "for service to the theatre and performing arts".

On April 27, 2007 a sculpture featuring Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson as portrayed by Vasily Livanov and Vitaly Solomin was opened on the Smolenskaya embankment alongside the Embassy of the United Kingdom in Moscow (sculptor Andrey Orlov).