Vladimir Menshov

Vladimir Valentinovich Menshov (; 17 September 1939 – 5 July 2021) was a Soviet and Russian actor and film director. He was noted for depicting the Russian everyman and working class life in his films. Although Menshov mostly worked as an actor, he is better known for the films he directed, especially for the 1979 melodrama Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Actress Vera Alentova, who starred in the film, is the mother of Vladimir Menshov's daughter Yuliya Menshova. Biography Menshov was born in a Russian family in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR. His father, Valentin Mikhailovich Menshov, was a sailor and later an NKVD officer; his mother Antonina Aleksandrovna Menshova (née Dubovskaya) was a housewife. Because of his father's work, the family lived in Baku, Arkhangelsk and Astrakhan. As a teenager Menshov worked as a machinist student at a factory, at a mine in Vorkuta, as a sailor on a diving boat in Baku, and also as an understudying actor at the Astrakhan Drama Theater. In 1961 he entered the acting department of the Moscow Art Theatre School. During the second year he married actress Vera Alentova who was also studying at the same theatre school. In 1965 he graduated from the acting department. After graduating, he worked for two years as actor and assistant director at the Stavropol Regional Drama Theater. In 1970 he graduated from the VGIK postgraduate course in the department of feature film direction (Mikhail Romm's workshop).