Leonid Kulagin

Leonid Nikolaevich Kulagin is a Soviet and Russian actor who also tried himself in film directing, writing scripts and staging performances. For his services to the culture of his native country, in 1986 he was awarded the title of People's Artist of the RSFSR. The most famous films of Leonid Nikolaevich are considered his debut film "The Noble Nest", the historical adventure film "The Ballad of the Valiant Knight Ivanhoe" and, of course, the detective television series "Kulagin and Partners".

A large and rich biography of Leonid Kulagin originates in the Siberian town of Kirensk, Irkutsk region. Until the age of 7, the boy lived on the banks of the Lena River, and then moved with his father to Nizhny Novgorod and grew up on the banks of the Volga River. The actor does not remember his mother very well, because she died on the operating table due to a medical error, when Lenya had not even gone to school yet. During her lifetime, she worked as an announcer, sang well. My father was a radio engineer. For a long time, one father was engaged in the upbringing of young Kulagin, and only much later a stepmother appeared in his life.

The man married his sister's girlfriend. Although the actor himself claims that today the language does not turn to call her a stepmother. For him, she became a second mother. It was she who taught him a lot, gave the rudiments of culture and taste, instilled a love of music. The woman gave all her love to the boy, but Leonid did not call her mother for a long time. As an adult, he realized that she had to sacrifice a lot for him and his father.

The creative and artistic Leonid had a passion for theater from a young age. When his dad worked as an electrician at a local drama theater, Kulagin disappeared behind the scenes for days. As a teenager, he first appeared on stage in the play "Young Guard". But after a couple of years, his father quit, and the teenager's access to his favorite place was closed. But he was not upset: in the courtyard he made friends with the musician of the Opera House orchestra and began to go there. By the end of school, Kulagin, who did not miss a single amateur competition and attended the acting studio at the Palace of Pioneers, knew by heart almost all the arias from the performances and sang very well.

Before him was a choice: to be an actor or a singer. Initially, the soul of the young man was more striving for music, but he realized that he would not be able to sing at the level of his idol Fyodor Chaliapin. And then, at the Gorky Academic Drama Theater, a Studio School was just opened, and Kulagin enters there. After receiving his diploma, the young man entered the troupe of the drama theater. However, Leonid quickly realized that here he, like other classmates, continues to be considered a student and is not taken seriously. The guy takes off, leaves for Chita, and later enters the theaters of Lipetsk and Bryansk. Since 1968, Kulagin has been a member of the troupe of the Moscow Drama Theater named after N.V. Gogol.

Time has shown that he made the right decision when he left Nizhny Novgorod: almost all of his former classmates remained on the sidelines. Leonid Nikolayevich himself performed on the theater stage until 1995. But when the play about the unsuccessful marriage of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe "After the Fall" came out, Kulagin decided to stop his acting career, which had lasted for 35 years. He retrained as theater directors, returned to Bryansk, where he played before moving to Moscow, and became the artistic director and chief director of the local Youth Theater.

For seven years, the talented person has staged 17 performances, some of which are still included in the theater's repertoire. During this time, he did not go on stage at all and did not act in films. But in 2004, Kulagin returned to the capital and headed the Producer Center "Theatrical Partnership". He again felt an interest in acting, began to get involved in entrepreneurial performances. Leonid considers the role of Admiral Nelson in the play "Lady and Admiral" to be his favorite work in the 21st century. The famous actresses Marina Mogilevskaya and Vera Glagoleva played with him.

Immediately after graduating from the theater studio, the newly-minted actor sent his photographs to all allied film studios. But I had to wait a long time. The call came from the Mosfilm film studio, where he was approved for the role of Commissioner Parfenov in the film almanac "The Beginning of an Unknown Age". This work was supposed to be the starting line in the filmography of Leonid Kulagin, but the censorship committee did not let the tape appear on the screens, seeing in it a mockery of the October Revolution. Therefore, the audience first saw the actor in the title role in the film adaptation of Ivan Turgenev's novel "The Noble Nest", which was directed by Andrei Konchalovsky. Together with him, Irina Kupchenko and the star of world cinema Beata Tyshkevich starred in the film.

This success was followed by images in the films "On Friends and Comrades", "Reckoning" and "Wandering Front". Kulagin also played the role of a fascist high-ranking officer in the military film "Comrade General". But the next interest of cinema fans to Kulagin was caused by the adaptation of Russian classics, this time the drama "Privalov Millions" based on the novel of the same name by Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak.

And in 1974, the first film in the history of the Soviet Union was released, which can be classified as an erotic genre. It's about the melodrama "Autumn", in which the director Andrei Smirnov decided to recreate the spicy and candid scenes. Leonid's partner was Natalya Rudnaya, the director's wife. And regardless of how these episodes are perceived by the audience, the actors themselves assert: the work was difficult from a moral point of view, and they did not experience any aesthetic pleasure, much less mutual attraction from participating in the shooting naked. The cinematographic authorities considered that some of the scenes were filmed "too candidly." As a result, the director Smirnov was excommunicated from work for a long time.

During the 80s, Leonid Kulagin's films came out one after another and immediately became hits on the Soviet screen. It is worth highlighting the historical adventure picture "The collapse of the operation" Terror ", the film about horses" Strong Man ", the war drama" Fight at the Crossroads ", the spy tape" Password - "Hotel Regina".

The film adaptations of the books by Walter Scott "The Ballad of the Valiant Knight Ivanhoe" and "The Adventures of Quentin Dorward, Archer of the Royal Guard" enjoyed great success. In the early 90s, Kulagin appeared as the father of the protagonist in the film for young people "The Childhood of Tyoma", as an investigator for particularly important cases in the crime thriller "Ay! Robbery of a Train ”and in a dozen more films, the last of which, the drama about World War II“ Tragedy of the Century ”, was filmed in 1993.

Until the XXI century, Leonid Nikolaevich refuses offers. Only in 2001 did he start filming again. Such films by Leonid Kulagin are released as the criminal drama "Gold of Ugra", the detective "Parisian Antiquary" and the second part of the action movie "Season of the Hunting".

But the main project of the actor is the series about investigations "Kulagin and Partners". It is noteworthy that real representatives of this profession also auditioned for the role of a lawyer, but the management preferred Leonid Nikolaevich to them, since he had not starred for many years, and the viewer could get the impression that the artist had actually changed his field of activity. And for this very reason, the character was renamed in the script, giving him the real surname of the performer. They say that this is the only case in history when a series is named after an actor that has not left the screens for a decade. Over 3000 episodes were filmed.

At the same time, Kulagin worked on the sets of the detectives "Golden Boys" and "My General", the adventure thriller "Wolfhound of the Gray Dogs", the comedy "Bankrupt", the melodrama "Paradise apples" and many other film projects. In 2016, the actor took part in the TV series "Mysterious Passion", where he played the writer Vasily Aksyonov. In addition, Kulagin was invited to the melodrama of the Turkish production "Russian Game". In addition to him, Russian actress Anastasia Klyueva and Turkish star Firat Tanish are involved there.

In 2017, the premiere of the film “Ekaterina. Takeoff ”- a continuation of the line of fate of the great Empress Catherine II, begun in the film“ Catherine ”. Leonid Kulagin played Archbishop Gabriel.

Kulagin the director is also worthy of attention. Back in 1993, Leonid Nikolayevich wrote his own script for the crime film "She-Wolf" and shot a film about the escape from a French concentration camp during World War II. After 10 years, the director again takes up work and creates the series "Drilling" about young people who go to work in Siberia and are faced with a moral choice. In his films, Kulagin filmed Andrei Ilyin, Anna Samokhina, Yegor Barinov, Anton Makarsky and other Russian stars.

In 2003, Leonid Nikolaevich was awarded the Order of Honor for many years of fruitful activity in the field of culture and art.

When Leonid played in the drama theater in Nizhny Novgorod, he met the actress Mila Nelskaya, who had come on tour from Chita. Feelings flared up between the young people, and the girl achieved the transfer of her lover to the Chita regional drama theater. The personal life of Leonid Kulagin with this woman lasted a year and a half, but they quickly realized that their passion was gradually dying down, because Leonid and Mila were too different people.

Once he woke up, and Mila was not around. I went into the kitchen, and there she was writing a love letter to another man - a theater director. Leonid forgave her because he loved her. But from that moment on, their relationship fell apart. After parting, the actor started drinking, he poured his loneliness with alcohol. Although before meeting with Mila Nelskaya, he did not drink or smoke.

Soon Leonid leaves to work at the Lipetsk theater and there he meets his current wife, Eleanor Lapitskaya. By the way, his second love performed on stage the same roles as Kulagin's first wife. The woman lived in a civil marriage, but this did not stop Leonid Nikolaevich, as he believed that her husband was "fake." He courted and sought her location in all ways. Soon, Eleanor married Leonid Nikolaevich, and since then they have been together.

Ele had to endure her husband's drunken antics and do the impossible: persuade Kulagin to encode. They had a son, Alexei, and now they already have an adult grandson, Kirill. None of Kulagin's descendants followed in his footsteps, although both the son and the grandson were interested in theater in childhood, and Kirill even studied at the Actor's House on the Arbat. Today, Kulagin's son holds a leading position in an advertising agency, and the actor's grandson has devoted himself to the financial sphere.

In all interviews, Leonid Nikolaevich calls himself a fatalist. He is sure that all the events of our life are predetermined, and success or failure depends only on how attentively we are to the signs that fate sends.

Leonid Kulagin in 2014-2015 participated in the filming of the series "Sasha is kind, Sasha is evil." Filming took place on the territory of Crimea, in Balaklava and Sevastopol.

In May 2018, the actor gave an interview to Tatyana Ustinova in her author's program "My Hero". He said that he was no longer invited to the cinema. But now he dubs audiobooks. His first book was the 800-page work of Ivan Shmelev, The Heavenly Ways. Leonid Nikolayevich admits that when he read it, he could hardly hold back tears.

After the scoring of literary works became a regular job for Leonid Nikolaevich. His list includes a huge amount of classical literature - "Crime and Punishment", "Running on the waves", "Dead Souls" and others. Also, with no less enthusiasm, the artist takes on the scoring of children's books - he "gave" his voice to the books about Dunno and one of the parts of Harry Potter.

Leonid Kulagin had a joint project with Radio Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church, in which he read the history of the Christian Church and the New Testament.

In April 2018, the People's Artist of Russia took part in the concert “Mozart. Requiem. Pushkin. Mozart and Salieri ”, which took place in the Cathedral of Peter and Paul. He recited Salieri's monologue. In an interview with Tatyana Ustinova, he said that he plans to give five more similar events.

1969 - "Nest of Nobility" 1972 - "Privalov Millions" 1980 - "The collapse of Operation Terror" 1983 - "The Ballad of the Valiant Knight Ivanhoe" 1991 - "Ay! Robbery of a train "2004 -" Ashes of "Phoenix" 2004-2013 - "Kulagin and Partners" 2005-2006 - "Golden Boys" 2009 - "Bankrupt" 2014 - "Kuprin. Pit "2016 -" Mysterious Passion "2016 -" Ekaterina. Takeoff"

Leonid Kulagin 's estimated Net Worth, Salary, Income, Cars, Lifestyles & many more details have been updated below.

Let's check, How Rich is Leonid Kulagin in 2020 ?

Leonid Kulagin Net Worth 2021

Leonid Kulagin 's revenue is $ 1.2M in 2021. It is an approximate forecast of how rich is Leonid Kulagin and could vary in the range between $ 828.2K - $ 1.9M.

Leonid Kulagin Net Worth 2020

Leonid Kulagin 's revenue is $1.9M in 2020. It is an approximate forecast of how rich is Leonid Kulagin and could vary in the range between $529K - $1.6M.

Leonid Kulagin Net Worth 2019

Leonid Kulagin 's revenue is $1.6M in 2019. It is an approximate forecast of how rich is Leonid Kulagin and could vary in the range between $653.4K - $1.1M.

Leonid Kulagin Net Worth 2018

Leonid Kulagin 's revenue is $1.1M in 2018. It is an approximate forecast of how rich is Leonid Kulagin and could vary in the range between $568.3K - $1.6M.

Leonid Kulagin Net Worth 2017

Leonid Kulagin 's revenue is $1.6M in 2017. It is an approximate forecast of how rich is Leonid Kulagin and could vary in the range between $610.3K - $1.1M.

Leonid Kulagin Net Worth 2016

Leonid Kulagin 's revenue is $1.8M in 2016. It is an approximate forecast of how rich is Leonid Kulagin and could vary in the range between $843.7K - $1.3M.

Leonid Kulagin Net Worth 2015

Leonid Kulagin 's revenue is $1.2M in 2015. It is an approximate forecast of how rich is Leonid Kulagin and could vary in the range between $597K - $1.7M.

It is an overall forecast for the net worth of Leonid Kulagin. The evaluation covers the latest 5 years and an approximation for next year. See above to learn how much money does Leonid Kulagin make a year.

The range above shows an estimation based on evaluation generated by public information about sponsorships or other sources found on the internet. It's summarized data from Leonid Kulagin' projects existing in AidWiki's repository. It's an approximation of the revenue compiled by AidWiki and may not correspond with the real amount.