Sergei Garmash

Sergei Garmash: The Face Russia Sends to the Jury Room

In Nikita Mikhalkov's *12*, twelve men are locked in a school gymnasium to decide whether a Chechen boy killed his Russian stepfather. Eleven of them are types; one of them is a wound. Sergei Garmash plays the third juror, a nationalist taxi driver, and the performance works because he refuses to let the character be simply a bigot — the loathing has a grievance underneath it, and Garmash lets the audience see the grievance without excusing the loathing. The film took a Special Golden Lion at Venice for "consistent brilliance" and an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Vladimir Putin watched it and said it brought a tear to the eye; the journalist Zoya Svetova called it pro-Putin propaganda. Garmash is somewhere in the middle of that argument, as he has been for most of his career.

Kherson

Sergei Leonidovich Garmash was born on 1 September 1958 in Kherson, in the Ukrainian SSR. His mother, Lyudmila Ippolitovna, had seven years of schooling and worked as a dispatcher at the bus station; his father, Leonid Trofimovich, drove vehicles before taking an institute degree and moving into management. It was, precisely, an ordinary Soviet working household.

He was a bad boy in the specific provincial way: fights, broken windows, classmates persuaded to skip lessons and go to the cinema instead. His mathematics was hopeless, his humanities strong, and he read enormously. He was expelled more than once. What he actually wanted was the sea — a nautical institute, a career on ships. Acting was not an ambition; it was an administrative convenience. His mother enrolled him at the Dnepropetrovsk theatre school in part because it had fewer entrance examinations than the alternatives.

He graduated as a puppet theatre actor and went to work in and around Kherson, touring villages and collective farms with productions. It is worth pausing on that, because it is the least glamorous training available anywhere in the performing arts and it left a permanent mark: Garmash's screen presence is that of a man who has performed in rooms where nobody in the audience is obliged to be polite. Then came conscription — the Soviet Army, a construction battalion at Bologoye.

Moscow

Demobilised, he went to Moscow in 1980 and auditioned for the Moscow Art Theatre School with a long extract from Dostoevsky, which impressed the examiners enough to get him in. He was a charming and disorderly student, suspended from his scholarship for absenteeism and reduced, with friends, to working as a janitor. His teacher, Tarkhanov, shaped how he thought about the work. He graduated in 1984.

The Sovremennik Theatre took him the same year, and he stayed thirty-six years. He also made sure that Inna Timofeeva, the fellow student he had met when she was sixteen and who had visited him daily in hospital after he broke his leg, was hired alongside him; they married and she is still in the company. Their daughter Daria was born in 1988, their son Ivan in 2006, and the first grandchild arrived in January 2017.

His Sovremennik roles were the ones Russian actors are measured by: Lopakhin in *The Cherry Orchard*, Famusov in Griboyedov's *Woe from Wit*, Alphonse in *Three Comrades*, the elder brother in *Karamazovs and Hell*. The Famusov brought him a Kumir award in 2009. He left the theatre in July 2020, after the death of Galina Volchek, the director who had run it for most of his time there.

The Screen

Garmash's film debut came in 1984, at twenty-six, as Urin in *Detachment*. The early credits accumulated — *In the Shooting Wilderness* (1985), *Wild Pigeon* (1986), *Stalingrad* (1989), *The Master and Margarita* (1994), where he played the poet Ivan Bezdomny — but the stardom did not. By 2000 he had appeared in over fifty films; his filmography now runs past 160 productions, including three films nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He worked with Mikhalkov and with Timur Bekmambetov.

What changed his standing was television and middle age. He was past forty when *Dossier of Detective Dubrovsky* and then five seasons of *Kamenskaya*, in which he played Major Korotkov, made him nationally recognisable. From there came the run of film work that produced the awards: Nika Awards in 2000 for *Tender Age*, and again in 2004, 2007 and 2011; Golden Eagles in 2007 and 2008; *Poor Relatives* (2005), *12* (2007), Valery Todorovsky's *Stilyagi* (2008), and *Matilda* (2017), in which he played Emperor Alexander III. He holds the title People's Artist of Russia.

Why Sergei Is Called a Genius

The honest version of the claim is that Garmash is one of the most reliable character actors of the post-Soviet era, and that reliability is a technical achievement rather than an intellectual one. Nobody in the record calls him a genius; what Russian critics and awards juries have repeatedly recognised — four Nikas, two Golden Eagles, the People's Artist title — is a specific and unusual capacity.

It consists of this. Garmash's stock character is the aggrieved Russian man: the taxi driver, the policeman, the tsar, the provincial bruiser. That type is normally played from the outside, as a warning. Garmash plays it from the inside, and the technique is a refusal to editorialise. He gives the character his full physical commitment — the barrel chest, the too-loud voice, the eyes that go somewhere else mid-sentence — without inserting a single beat of authorial judgement, which is why the nationalist juror in *12* is frightening rather than merely contemptible. Directors get from him a thing that is difficult to buy: a man who will make an unattractive character comprehensible without softening him. Mikhalkov built a chamber film around eleven other actors and still needed Garmash to supply the room's heat.

The counter-case is substantial. He is an interpreter, not an author; he has written nothing and directed nothing. Much of his output is Russian television procedural work, and even his admirers concede that the type has been repeated. He is a state-honoured artist within a national cinema that has grown increasingly instrumental, and *12* itself — the film that carries most of his international reputation — was received by some as propaganda. And Garmash's own account of himself is deliberately unromantic: "The path from an actor of the Kherson Puppet Theater to the People's Artist of Russia was not easy," he said, crediting talent and hard work rather than any gift. On his own evidence, the word for him is not genius but craftsman, in the full and unembarrassed sense.

Legacy

There is a bitter symmetry in the shape of the career. A boy from Kherson who wanted to go to sea became the most recognisable face of Russian screen masculinity, and then the country of his birth and the country of his stage became, in his lifetime, enemies. Whatever conclusion history draws about that, the body of work stands: 160-odd films, thirty-six years in one of Moscow's great companies, and the Lopakhin and the Famusov, which are the two roles by which Russian actors of his generation are still weighed.

Achievements

• Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland — 2011
• Worked as actor, theatre director and film producer