Biography
Grigori Georgievich Nikulin was born on December 5, 1922, in the village of Treshchovka, Saratov province, USSR. His father, Georgi Nikulin, was a Volga boatman who became a Red Army soldier during the Communist Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War.
Grigori Nikulin attended a rural school until the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1940, he was drafted into the Red Army and fought on the Eastern Front. He participated in several major WWII battles, from the Battle of Stalingrad to the Battle for Berlin. In 1945, Nikulin served in a special security unit guarding the meeting of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Harry S. Truman, and Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference. He was wounded, discharged with honors, and awarded the Medal of Victory in the Second World War.
After WWII, Grigori Nikulin studied at the Leningrad Institute of Theatre and Cinema, graduating in 1952 as a film director. From 1952 to 1956, he worked as a director with the Bolshoi Drama Theatre (BDT) troupe in Leningrad. In 1956, he made his film directing debut with Nevesta (1957), a classic drama that also marked the acting debut of young Oleg Basilashvili. Nikulin was among the first directors to cast the then-unknown actor Vladimir Vysotskiy as a co-star in the drama 713 y prosit posadku (1962). Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he produced several adaptations of Russian literature for film and television. In the 1980s, Nikulin directed and produced his largest work, the ten-hour epic Khleb - imya sushchestvitelnoe (1988) (also known as Bread is the Proper Noun), which was released in theaters and on television.
From the 1950s to the 2000s, Grigori Nikulin worked as a film director and producer at Lenfilm Studios, collaborating with renowned Russian cinema stars such as Kirill Lavrov, Oleg Basilashvili, Alisa Freyndlikh, Nina Ruslanova, Natalya Sayko, Stanislav Lyubshin, Sergey Nikonenko, and many others. He also taught film directing through his master class in Leningrad. Nikulin passed away from heart failure on August 15, 2007, at his home in St. Petersburg and was buried in Smolenskoe Cemetery in St. Petersburg, Russia.
