His paternal grandfather, Pyotr Konstantinovich Bondarchuk, was ethnically Bulgarian, the grandmother, Matryona Fyodorovna Sirvulya, was Serbian.

His mother, being a deeply religious person, named her son in honor of Sergius of Radonezh and baptized him in the Annunciation Monastery near Kherson.

In 1952, he was awarded the Stalin Prize for the leading role in the film Taras Shevchenko; that same year, at the age of 32, he became the youngest Soviet actor ever to receive the top dignity of People's Artist of the USSR.

[1] Bondarchuk earned international fame with his epic production of Tolstoy's War and Peace, which on original release totaled more than seven hours of cinema, took six years to complete and won Bondarchuk, who both directed and acted the role of Pierre Bezukhov, the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1968.

[2] The year after his victory, in 1969, he starred as Martin with Yul Brynner and Orson Welles in the Yugoslav epic Battle of Neretva, directed by Veljko Bulajic.

[5] In 1982 came Red Bells, based on John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World (which serves as the film's alternative title).

[7] Bondarchuk's last feature film, and his second in English, was an epic TV version of Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don, starring Rupert Everett.

It was filmed in 1992–1993 but premiered on Channel One only in November 2006,[8] as there were disputes concerning the Italian studio that was co-producing over unfavorable clauses in his contract, which left the tapes locked in a bank vault.