Vitali Bryanskiy

Biography

Born in 1885, Vitali Bryanskiy stepped before the camera when Russian cinema was still inventing its own shadowed poetry. Audiences first noticed him in the 1915 dramas Lyubov statskogo sovetnika and Obozhzhenniye krylya, then again eight years later as the Soviet adventure Krasnye dyavolyata flashed across the screen. The actor’s century closed in September 1964 in Kalinin—today’s Tver—where the Volga kept flowing past the city that once book-ended his life.