6/3/2023 0 Comments Sabaki byvayut vysotskyBut he was also a Soviet stage and movie star. Vysotsky’s iconic status in his homeland derived from his poignant, ironic, and cleverly subversive songs - delivered in a passionate, guttural rasp - that circulated hand-to-hand on underground recordings across the Soviet Union’s 11 time zones. That was something that Vysotsky, who died 40 years ago this week, had hoped to change in what turned out to be the final chapter of his short, hard-lived life. “And the thing that was different was having Vysotsky. “It was a typical party in Hollywood with lots of people in the business, some who knew each other and others who didn’t,” said Medavoy, who has been involved in seven Best Picture Oscar-winners and at the time served as head of production at United Artists. Only a handful of guests knew that the man delivering this impromptu performance in Russian, Vladimir Vysotsky, was among the most famous people in the Soviet Union - a land hidden behind the Iron Curtain at the time, deep in the Cold War. “He took the guitar, sat in the living room, and played,” Medavoy told RFE/RL. His intense eyes “glistened with excitement” on that evening, and an implant of the antialcoholism drug disulfiram had helped liberate him temporarily from his bondage to the bottle, his wife would later write.Īt some point during the evening, the host of the party, Hollywood producer Mike Medavoy, introduced the man, who had brought his own seven-string guitar to the star-studded gathering. The partygoers, according to witnesses, included Hollywood royalty and rising talent alike: Gregory Peck, Natalie Wood, Liza Minnelli, Robert De Niro, Anthony Hopkins, Michael Douglas, and Sylvester Stallone, whose film Rocky would make him a worldwide star after its release four months later in November 1976.Ī stranger dressed in pale blue maneuvered his short, sturdy frame through the crowd as well. On a balmy summer evening in the posh Los Angeles neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, movie stars and industry players mingled around the pool and on the veranda, nursing drinks and clouding the air with plumes of expensive cigar smoke. This article has been republished to mark the 40th anniversary of Vladimir Vysotsky's death on July 25, 1980.
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