He worked with Meyerhold on several of his most famous productions: Mistery-Buffo (1921), The Forest (1924), The Magnanimous Cuckold (1926), Woe to Wit (1928), The Bedbug (1929).

Alongside Erast Garin, he was the most prominent actor in the Meyerhold theater and this is where he learned the acting technique called Biomechanics.

“I can act on the roof of a train carriage, on the radiator of a moving car, on back of a galloping horse, or while swimming in the sea”.In 1938 he joined the Maly Theatre that had been his favourite one since school years.

Ilyinsky would later write that it was Russian classic literature that had helped him overcome the crisis and feeling that he had been unable to create new characters, different from the previous ones.

An outstandingly prolific period in the actor's life was related to his work with the film director Grigori Aleksandrov.

“I was not going to feature the great Igor Ilyinsky in Carnival Night - I felt timid, and understood that being a coryphaeus he would suppress me.

And me, directing my first film, on the other scale!” (Eldar Ryazanov)In Maly Theatre at the same time Ilyinsky shifted to portrayals of deeply tragic characters, in particular, from Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy.

The last period of Ilyinsky's career was marked by his portrayal of Leo Tolstoy in the play Turning Full Circle and of Firs, and his performance in The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov.