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Boris Khmelnitsky was a renowned Russian film and theatre actor and a member of the famed Taganka Theatre troupe led by director Yuriy Lyubimov.
Born Boris Alekseevich Khmelnitsky on June 27, 1940, in Ussuriisk, a small town near Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East, he was raised in a privileged environment. His father, Aleksei Khmelnitsky, was a senior officer in the Soviet Red Army and managed several Army clubs across the USSR. From an early age, Boris studied literature, arts, and music, immersed in the cultured atmosphere of his father's circle. He graduated from Lvov College of Music in 1961 as an orchestral conductor, then completed acting studies at Moscow’s Shchukin Theatre School in 1966. That same year, he debuted in film with 'Kto vernetsa - dolyubit' directed by Leonid Osyka. Khmelnitsky gained fame through roles in _Sofiya Perovskaya (1967)_ by Lev Arnshtam and _Krasnaya palatka (1970)_. He became best known in the USSR for portraying Robin Hood in _The Arrows of Robin Hood (1975)_, a role he reprised in _The Ballad of the Valiant Knight Ivanhoe (1983)_.
Between 1964 and 1984, Khmelnitsky was part of Yuriy Lyubimov’s troupe at Moscow’s Taganka Theatre. His stage colleagues included Vladimir Vysotskiy, Leonid Filatov, Venyamin Smekhov, Alla Demidova, Zinaida Slavina, Ivan Dykhovichnyy, Boris Galkin, Aleksandr Porokhovshchikov, Valeriy Zolotukhin, Natalya Sayko, Nikolay Gubenko, Zhanna Bolotova, Nina Shatskaya, Leonid Yarmolnik, among other prominent Russian actors. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he took leading roles in Taganka’s productions such as 'Pugachev' and 'Master i Margarita', a stage adaptation of Mikhail A. Bulgakov’s novel. He also composed music for several Taganka performances.
Celebrated across the former Soviet Union, Khmelnitsky was part of the intellectual "60s generation." He was honored as People's Artist of Russia in 2000. He passed away from a chronic illness on February 16, 2008, and was buried alongside his parents at Kuntsevskoe Cemetery in Moscow. He is survived by his former wife, Marianna Vertinskaya, and their daughter, Darya Khmelnitskaya.
