role brought Ilyinsky the State Prize. Stalin reportedly watched the film sixteen times. At Molotov's birthday party Stalin flung Ilyinsky a remark: “Ah, Byvalov! You are a bureaucrat and I am a bureaucrat. We shall understand each other”. The success of that movie determined the development of Soviet film comedy for the next several decades. However, after the film Ilyinsky almost stopped his film acting. In the mid-1950s Ilyinsky finally got a chance to act in a movie. It was a light comedy, A Crazy Day. The character created by Ilyinsky was a repetition of what he had done 20 years earlier. He managed to play a truly starry film role only 18 years after Volga-Volga. It was the role of the bureaucrat Ogurtsov in the smash-hit comedy Carnival Night, directed by Eldar Ryazanov. “I was not going to feature the great Igor Ilyinsky in Carnival Night - I felt timid, and understood that being a coryphaeus he would suppress me. When Pyryev offered him for the role of Ogurtsov, I just panicked: he was my idol from childhood, the famous actor of the Meyerhold Theatre! And me, directing my first film, on the other scale!” (Eldar Ryazanov) Later years In Maly Theatre at the same time Ilyinsky shifted to portrayals of deeply tragic characters, in particular, from Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy. In the late 1960s Ilyinsky went into stage directing. His first stage production was the stage version of Gustave Flaubert's popular novel Madame Bovary. The last period of Ilyinsky's career was marked by his portrayal of Leo Tolstoy in the play Turning Full Circle and of Firs, and his performance in The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov. As a very old person Igor Ilyinsky acted a lot on the radio – almost blind, he was accompanied to the studio. Death Igor Ilyinsky died on 13 January 1987, aged 85. His widow, actress Tatyana Yeremeyeva, died on 29 November 2012, aged 99. Legacy A minor planet 3622 Ilinsky, discovered by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Zhuravleva in 1981 is named after Igor Ilyinsky. Filmography 1924: Aelita as Kravtsov, amateur sleuth 1924: Papirosnitsa ot Mosselproma as Nikodim Mityushin, bookkeeper 1925: The Tailor from Torzhok as Petya Petelkin 1926: The Three Million Trial as Tapioka 1926: Miss Mend as Tom Hopkins, clerk 1926: Kogda probuzhdayutsa mertvye 1927: A Kiss From Mary Pickford as Goga 1928: Kukla s millionami as Pierre Cuisinai 1930: