Eldar Aleksandrovich Ryazanov (Russian: Эльдар Александрович Рязанов; 18 November 1927 – 30 November 2015) was a Soviet and Russian film director, screenwriter, poet, actor and pedagogue whose popular comedies, satirizing the daily life of the Soviet Union and Russia, are celebrated throughout the former Soviet Union and former Warsaw Pact countries.

In 1937 his father was arrested by the Stalinist government and subsequently served 18 years in the correctional labour camps.

At first, Ryazanov refused, as he wanted to make "serious films", but then was convinced to begin, as Pyryev believed that "anybody could shoot a melodrama, but only a few can create good comedy.

The Irony of Fate is still aired every December 31 in most post-USSR countries, except for Ukraine since the 2014 Revolution of Dignity.

In his book "Nepoladki v russkom dome" Sergey Kara-Murza wrote that "Ryazanov and the artists close to him, consumed by anti-Soviet feeling, lovingly reflected and thereby in many ways created a certain social and spiritual world - and this world turned out to be possible only when it was surrounded and protected by the crude structures of the Soviet way of life.