MOSCOW (AP) — Renowned Soviet and Russian actor and director Yuri Lyubimov, founder of Moscow’s world-famous Taganka Theater, which he led for more than four decades, died Sunday at age 97.
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During the 1980s, Lyubimov was exiled for five years after criticizing cultural restrictions in the Soviet Union in an interview with a British newspaper.
Lyubimov’s death in a Moscow hospital led Russian television and radio news broadcasts. President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman expressed Putin’s condolences, noting that “it would be difficult to overestimate the role of Yuri Lyubimov in the development of modern Russian theater.”
His wife, Katalin Lyubimova, told the Tass news agency that he died peacefully in his sleep Sunday morning, three days after he was hospitalized.
With the exception of the five years he spent abroad, Lyubimov led the Taganka Theater from its founding in 1964 until 2011, when he left following a dispute with the actors. He continued to work and in 2013 he staged the opera “Prince Igor” at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow.
