Archil Gomiashvili

Archil Mikhaylovich Gomiashvili (, , March 23, 1926 – May 31, 2005) was a Soviet Georgian theatre and film actor (People's Artist of Georgia, 1966) best known for his part of Ostap Bender in Leonid Gaidai's 1971 adaptation of Ilf and Petrov's The Twelve Chairs. In the late 1980s Gomiashvili quit the stage to become a businessman, the Ostap Bender Club owner, and philanthropist. Biography Archil Gomiashvili was born on March 23, 1926, in Chiatura, Soviet Georgia. His father, an Institute of Red Professors graduate, was the Donbas miners' trade-union leader, when in the years of the Great Purge he was arrested, to be freed only in 1944. Having spent two years in the Tbilisi Academy of Arts' school, Archil Gomiashvili joined the Moscow Art Theatre's college-studio but had to leave Moscow in 1948 after an incident involving a fistfight. In 1958 he moved to Poti to join the Eristavi Theatre's troupe, then returned to Tbilisi as a member of the Russian Griboyedov Theatre. Gomiashvili debuted on the big screen in 1957, playing Mantasherov in Personally Known, the first film of the Kamo trilogy. In 1961 he appeared in Cossacks after Leo Tolstoy's novelet. 1965 saw him cast in the Special Task, the second installment of the Kamo trilogy, as Mantasherov again, and Mikhail Chiaureli-directed musical comedy These Are New Times.