Oleg Vidov, a matinee idol in the Soviet Union who defected to the United States at the height of the Cold War and then had a long film and TV career in Hollywood, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 73.
His wife, Joan Borsten Vidov, said the cause was complications of cancer.
Blond and blue-eyed, Mr. Vidov became a top box office draw in the Soviet Union starting in the 1960s, usually in hero roles. Russian audiences flocked to see him in fairy tales, romantic films and a 1972 cowboy movie called “The Headless Horseman,” which sold a reported 300 million tickets.
His work got attention from international filmmakers, but his efforts to work abroad were blocked by the Communist state, which also thwarted him in a foray into directing. So in 1985 Mr. Vidov orchestrated an escape to the West through Yugoslavia. He was granted political asylum in the United States and landed in Southern California, where he was called the “Soviet Robert Redford.”
He kicked off his Hollywood career with a small part in “Red Heat,” a 1988 movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger after the director Walter Hill determined that Mr. Vidov was too handsome to play the film’s bad guy, a Soviet drug kingpin.
ADVERTISEMENT
“‘The camera just doesn’t think you are bad,’” Mr. Hill told Mr. Vidov, his wife recalled on Tuesday. “But he loved working with Arnold.”
He went on to appear in “Wild Orchid” in 1990 with Mickey Rourke, and Warren Beatty’s “Love Affair” in 1994.
Days before his death, his wife said, Mr. Vidov and his family watched “13 Days,” the 2000 political thriller in which he appeared alongside Kevin Costner as Valerian Zorin, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
His TV roles included appearances on “Criminal Minds,” “Alias” and “The West Wing.”
Mr. Vidov’s arrival in the United States got him blackballed in the Soviet Union. State-owned TV channels stopped playing his movies, but eventually bowed to popular demand and broadcast them without using his name.
In late 1985 he testified on Soviet cultural life at a congressional hearing, praising the more open society being pushed by the Kremlin leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. He eventually became an American citizen.
After the fall of the Soviet bloc, Mr. Vidov returned several times to his homeland, where his movies were the subject of film festivals. Channel One Russia gave him a prime-time 70th birthday party that reportedly drew 250 million viewers across Europe.
In addition to acting, Mr. Vidov started a production company that restored Russian animated films dating to the 1930s. In 2007, he helped found the Malibu Beach Recovery Center, a drug and alcohol treatment facility.
Besides his wife, he is survived by his sons Viacheslav and Sergei and a grandson.
No comments:
Post a Comment