Armen Dzhigarkhanyan
Monday, November 29, 2021Armen Borisovich Dzhigarkhanyan (3 October 1935 – 14 November 2020) was a Soviet, Armenian, and Russian actor.
Born and raised in Yerevan, Dzhigarkhanyan started acting in the academic and Russian theaters of the city, before moving to Moscow to continue stage acting. Since 1960, he appeared in a number of Armenian films. He became popular in the 1970s with the various roles he portrayed in Soviet films like The New Adventures of the Elusive Avengers (1968), its sequel The Crown of the Russian Empire, or Once Again the Elusive Avengers (1971) and The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed (1979). After almost 30 years on the stage of the Mayakovsky Theatre, Dzhigarkhanyan taught at VGIK and in 1996 he founded his own drama theater in Moscow.
With more than 250 appearances, Dzhigarkhanyan, one of the most renowned film and stage Armenian and Russian actors, appeared in more films than any other Russian actor.
Armen Dzhigarkhanyan was born in Yerevan, Armenian SSR, Soviet Union on 3 October 1935. His paternal grandfather, a "professional tamada", came from an Armenian family from Tbilisi, Georgia's capital. He graduated from a Russian high school named after Anton Chekhov. Between 1953 and 1954, he worked as camera operator's assistant at the state-run Hayfilm studio.
Dzhigarkhanyan was married three times. In the early 1960s, he secretly married Alla Vanovskaya, an actress at the Stanislavski Russian Theatre of Yerevan. Their daughter Yelena was born in 1964 and died at age 23 in 1987 of suffocation while asleep, because she left the car engine running. His second partner, Tatyana Vlasova, was also an actress at the Stanislavski Theatre in Yerevan. They never officially married, but they started living together in 1967, when they moved to Moscow together. Tatyana now resides in Dallas, Texas and works as a Russian language teacher at a university. Dzhigarkhanyan often visited her. His third wife is 43 years younger than him.
In the last years of his life, Dzhigarkhanyan suffered from poor health. He was hospitalized in March 2016 and January 2018. In April 2018 he again was hospitalized after a heart attack and fell into a coma.Dzhigarkhanyan died in Moscow on November 14, 2020. The cause of death was cardiac arrest due to kidney failure and other chronic diseases. Presidents of Russia Vladimir Putin and Armenia Armen Sarkissian, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin issued messages of condolence.