Awards :
Il est Artiste du peuple de l'URSS à partir de 1947 et gagne 5 fois le prix d'État de l'URSS.
Biography
Nikolai Cherkasov was born on July 27, 1903 in Saint Petersburg to a father who was a railway worker. From his childhood he was passionate about music and opera. Nikolai Cherkasov was mobilized at the age of 16 to participate in defense work in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg), a few months later he was demobilized and enrolled in medicine at the Military Academy. At the same time he took mime classes at the Marie Theater (later the Kirov Theater). From 1919 Nikolai Cherkasov worked as a mime artist at the Marie Theatre and at the same time took courses at the Institute of Performing Arts, from which he graduated in 1926. From 1926 to 1929 Nikolai Cherkasov was an actor at the Tyuz Theatre in Leningrad and then he performed in the music hall in both Moscow and Leningrad.
Nikolai Cherkasov made his screen debut in 1927 with The Poet and the Tsar
The first film that made him famous was The Baltic Deputy (1936/37), in which he played the role of Professor Polezhaiev at the age of 30, who was 70.
Nikolai Cherkasov then showed that he was not only a comedy actor but that he had wide possibilities of interpretation. His performance of the role of Peter the Great in Vladimir Petrov's film is remarkable.
It is probably in Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible that Nikolai Cherkasov best shows the immensity of his talent. First, physically, he achieves the feat of representing Ivan the Terrible at 16 stages of his life, from the coronation (when Ivan is only 17) to the age of 53. If, through his piercing gaze and his sonorous voice, he knows so well how to convey the authority of the self-assured tsar, through the same gaze that has become anxious and questioning, and through his voice that has become hesitant, Nikolai Cherkasov knows how to communicate to us in all its spiritual dimension the prince's anguish in the face of solitude.
From 1938, Nikolai Cherkasov was a deputy of the Supreme Soviet and a member of the Communist Party from 1940.