He was preparing to become a military translator, but Nikita Khrushchev closed the Military Institute of Foreign Languages, and Nikolai Gubenko became an artist. The thought comes: according to the destinies of our actors, the history of the country can be traced.
Even the date of birth of Nicholas is historical - 1941, the year of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. 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.
Four of Gubenko's orphans were taken up by grandfather and grandmother, but it was hard for them to feed such a family, and soon Nikolai was sent to an orphanage, and then transferred to the Suvorov School, where he studied English.
As a schoolboy, he disappeared in the drama club, studied in a dance studio, and was accepted into the Odessa Youth Theater - first as a stage worker, later there were episodic roles.
And then there was VGIK, graduation in 1964 - Sergei 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 theater "Commonwealth of Taganka Actors".
Film career
Immediately after graduating from VGIK in 1964, Nikolai Gubenko began acting in films, and these were four films at once. And immediately success - the film "I am twenty years old" received a special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival.
However, his first notable work was his role in the film "The Last Swindler" - where Nikolai played the swindler Petya Dachnikov.
Already in 1968, viewers saw the first directorial work of Gubenko: "Forbidden Zone", "From the Life of Vacationers", "Wounded". In the last work, he was both a screenwriter and a director. We can say that this is an autobiographical film about Nikolai's post-war childhood in an orphanage.
Social and political activity
Perhaps this is a separate topic if we talk about the life of Nikolai Gubenko. As a caring person, he could not stay away from the social life of the country, from the culture as a whole. It is impossible to list all the spheres of Gubenko's activity, one 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 Presidential Council for Culture and Art, was the Deputy Chairman of the Moscow City Duma.
Personal life
At the Taganka Theater, Nikolai met a beautiful fair-haired girl - Zinada Slavina. They lived together, worked in the same theater, but life together did not work out.
With his next counterpart - actress Inna Ulyanova - he lived in the house of her father, the Deputy Minister of the USSR Coal Industry. It was a luxurious apartment, one could live and enjoy, but something also did not grow together.
In the late 60s, Nikolai Gubenko offered his hand and heart to actress Zhanna Bolotova, and she agreed. They had known each other for a long time, even from VGIK, but as often happens, they considered each other only a few years later. Gubenko has no children in this marriage. Together with his wife, they devote all their time to an artistic career.
