Vladimir Zeldin, believed to have been the world’s oldest working actor, has died aged 101, after appearing for 71 years at the same Moscow theatre.
The Russian actor appeared on stage as recently as last month, using a walking stick due to a broken hip, to appear in the play The Dance Teacher by the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega.
He had appeared in the play more than 1,000 times, Tass reported. The theatre had planned for him to appear again next February, to mark his 102nd birthday.
According to colleagues, Zeldin had been ill and spent the last three weeks in hospital. He died in the early hours of Monday morning.
Zeldin was born in 1915, when Tsar Nicholas II was on the Russian throne. He shot to fame when he appeared in the film They Met in Moscow, on which shooting began shortly before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
Filming was interrupted when Zeldin, who was then 26 and playing an illiterate shepherd who wins the heart of a beautiful swineherd, was sent to the front. But he was recalled on Stalin’s orders to finish shooting the film.
When the war finished, Zeldin joined Moscow’s Red Army Theatre, where he was part of the troupe from 1945 until his death. The theatre is now known as the Russian Army Theatre. Fellow actors at the theatre described him as full of energy until the very last.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, described Zeldin as “a marvellous actor with an extraordinary work ethic and immense creative energy”. He said the actor’s death was a loss for all Russian culture.
Zeldin’s coffin will be laid out in the the Russian Army Theatre on Thursday, before he is buried in Moscow’s prestigious Novodevichy cemetery.
