Composer Peter Tchaikovsky came to what was then the Aquarium theatre (and is now Stage # 4 of Lenfilm) as a guest to the 1893 performance of the overture to his ballet The Nutcracker.

In 1923 the nationalized Aquarium garden was merged with SevZapKino and several smaller studios to form the Soviet state-controlled film industry in St.

At that time many notable filmmakers, writers, and actors were active at the studio, such as Yevgeni Zamyatin, Grigori Kozintsev, Iosif Kheifets, Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Yutkevich, Dmitri Shostakovich, Nikolai Akimov, Yuri Tynyanov, Veniamin Kaverin, Viktor Shklovsky, and the writers of Serapion Brothers, as well as many other figures of Russian and Soviet culture.

At the same time, most personnel and production units of the Lenfilm studio were evacuated to cities in Central Asia, such as Alma-Ata (1942) and Samarkand.

[citation needed] Today in the Aquarium Theater there is a stage where many famous Lenfilm pictures were shot and many film stars played their roles.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Lenfilm became a quasi-private film production company of Russia, retaining its name in spite of renaming of the city of Leningrad to St. Petersburg.

Lenfilm is tightly connected with world celebrities, such as those mentioned as well as Jane Fonda, Maximilian Schell, Marina Vlady, Julia Ormond, Michael Caine, William Hurt, Sophie Marceau, Sean Bean, Sandrine Bonnaire, Gérard Philipe, and with many great Russians, such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Alexander Ney, Kirill Lavrov, Daniil Granin, Pavel Kadochnikov, Aleksandr Demyanenko, and Sergey Kuryokhin.