October 28] – September 4, 1980, born Gerasimov)[b] was a Soviet and Russian actor, director and screenwriter.

[1] He was, together with Igor Ilyinsky and Sergey Martinson, one of the leading comic actors of Vsevolod Meyerhold's company and of the Soviet cinema.

He always looked up upon Meyerhold and Michael Chekhov as his mentors, rejecting naturalistic acting techniques propagated by Konstantin Stanislavski and paying utmost importance to voice and gesture.

The trance-like quality of his "grotesquely anxious" performances in Meyerhold's productions could be attributed to an expressionistic acting style.

In 1941, he was awarded the Stalin Prize for the role of Tarakanov in the film Musical Story.