Trivia

Member of the jury at the Venice Film Festival in 1957

The father, with Marina Ladynina, of a director Andrey Ladynin

He served as Director of the Mosfilm studios (1954-57) and was, for a time, the most influential man in the Soviet motion picture industry.

Following Joseph Stalin's death, Pyryev turned his attention to adaptations. He produced two acclaimed adaptations of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels, The Idiot (1958, starring Yury Yakovlev) and The Brothers Karamazov (1969), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and won him a Special Prize at the 6th Moscow International Film Festival.

Pyryev died at the age of 66 in Moscow. Since The Brothers Karamazov was unfinished at the time, the film stars Kirill Lavrov and Mikhail Ulyanov are usually credited with having brought the project to a conclusion.

Ivan Pyryev was a Soviet and Russian film director, screenwriter, actor and pedagogue remembered as the high priest of Stalinist cinema.

Pyryev also acted in Eisenstein's first short film Glumov's Diary.

His early career included acting on stage directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold in The Forest and by Sergei Eisenstein in the Proletcult Theatre production The Mexican.

Grigori Roshal wrote that "Pyriev's comedies speak of man's right to happiness, the attainment of which, in his native country, is not hindered by any national or class distinctions.".

He was awarded six Stalin Prizes (1941, 1942, 1946, 1946, 1948, 1951).

Even during wartime, when the Soviet film industry had been evacuated to Alma-Ata, Pyryev made popular and light-hearted features.

During the 1930s and 1940s Pyryev rivaled Grigori Aleksandrov as the country's most successful director of musical comedies, all of which starred his wife Marina Ladynina.

His movie "They Met in Moscow", was the last film made in the Soviet Union before the German invasion.

Pyryev's early career included production jobs behind the camera, such as work for director Yuri Tarich.

He debuted as a director in the age of silent film, with Strange Woman (1929).