[4][5] With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, Rybnikov the elder went to the front, and the mother took her sons and moved to Stalingrad to her sister, believing that it would be safe there.

In 1958, Nikolai Rybnikov starred in the picture by Eldar Ryazanov, The Girl Without an Address, and although the public took the film well (it took second place at the box office), it received weak critical reviews.

Nevertheless, in 1961 the actor agreed to appear in a comedy again, when director Yuri Chulyukin invited him to the main role of the lumberjack Ilya Kovrigin in the film The Girls.

[8] Nikolai Rybnikov became a favorite of audiences in the late 1950s and early 1960s, performing romantic characters of cheerful young men, with integrity and purity revealed through sharp and dramatic relationships with others.

[9] In the following years, Rybnikov acted a lot in film, including in He Submits to the Sky, War and Peace, where he played the role of Vasily Denisov, Liberation, The Hockey Players.

[4] Nikolay Rybnikov died on the morning of 22 October 1990 in his Moscow apartment from a heart attack, a month and a half before his sixtieth birthday.